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Would you believe, when you this monsieur see, That his whole body should speak French, not he? That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather, And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hether, And land on one whose face durst never be Toward the sea farther than Half-Way Tree? That he, untraveled, should be French so much As Frenchmen in his company should seem Dutch? Or had his father, when he did him get, The French disease, with which he labors yet? Or hung some monsieur’s picture on the wall, By which his dam conceived him, clothes and all? Or is it some French statue? No: ’T doth move, And stoop, and cringe. O then, it needs must prove The new French tailor’s motion, monthly made, Daily to turn in Paul’s, and help the trade.

This one got tired of lugging his fortress wherever he went, was done with duck and cover at every explosion through rustling leaves of fox and dog and skunk. Said au revoir to the ritual of pulling himself together. . . I imagine him waiting for the cover of darkness to let down his hinged drawbridge. He wanted, after so many protracted years of caution, to dance naked and nimble as a flame under the moon— even if dancing just once was all that the teeth of the forest would allow.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

All those poems I wrote About living in the sky Were wrong. I live on a leaf Of   a fern of   frost growing Up your bedroom window In forty below. I live on a needle of   a branch Of   a cedar tree, hard-bitten, Striving in six directions, Rooted in rock, a cedar Tree made of other trees, Not cedar but fir, Lodgepole, and blue spruce, Metastasizing like Bacteria to the fan- Lip of a draw to draw Water as soon as it slips From the snowdrift’s grip And flows downward from Branch to root — a tree Running in reverse. Or I live on a thorn on a trellis — Trained, restrained, maybe Cut back, to hold up Those flowers I’ve only heard of To whatever there is and isn’t Above.

When I read about the garden designed to bloom only white flowers, I think about the Spanish friar who saw one of my grandmothers, two hundred years removed, and fucked her. If you look at the word colony far enough, you see it traveling back to the Latin of inhabit,till, and cultivate. Words that would have meant something to the friar, walking among the village girls as though in a field of flowers, knowing that fucking was one way of   having a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow falling, which means that every angry thought is as short-lived as a match. The night is its own white garden: snow on the fence, snow on the tree stump, snow on the azalea bushes, their leaves hanging down like green bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics of a garden, but somewhere between what the eye sees and what the mind thinks is the world, landscapes mangled into sentences, one color read into rage. When the neighbors complained the roots of our cypress were buckling their lot, my landlord cut the tree down. I didn’t know a living thing three stories high could be so silent, until it was gone. Suddenly that sky. Suddenly all the light in the windows, as though every sheet of glass was having a migraine. When I think about that grandmother whose name I don’t even know, I think of what it would mean to make a garden that blooms black: peonies and gladiolas of deepest purple, tulips like ravens. Or a garden that doesn’t bloom at all: rocks poised on clean gravel. When the snow stops, I walk to see the quiet that has colonized everything. The main street is asleep, except for the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship. There are sheet cakes of  snow on top of cars. In front of   houses, each lawn is as clean as paper, except where the first cat or raccoon has walked across, each track like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.

Once there lived a man who had a valley-full of needles.  And one day the mother of Jesus came to him and said:  “Friend, my son’s garment is torn and I must needs mend it before he goeth to the temple.  Wouldst thou not give me a needle?” And he gave her not a needle, but he gave her a learned discourse on Giving and Taking to carry to her son before he should go to the temple.

Oh! could I see as thou hast seen, The garden of the west, When Spring in all her loveliness Fair nature’s face has dressed. The rolling prairie, vast and wild! It hath a charm for me— Its tall grass waving to the breeze, Like billows on the sea. Say, hast thou chased the bounding deer When smiled the rosy morn? Or hast thou listened to the sound Of the merry hunter’s horn? Once could the noble red-man call That prairie wild his home;— His cabin now in ruins laid, He must an exile roam, And thou at twilight’s pensive hour, Perchance hast seen him weep;— Tread lightly o’er the hallowed spot, For there his kindred sleep. I envy not the opulent His proud and lordly dome; Far happier is the pioneer Who seeks a prairie home;— Where no discordant notes are heard, But all is harmony; Where soars aloft unfettered thought, And the heart beats light and free.

My eyes lie flat in my skull, darkened, bruised lashes whip-stitched to swollen lids – sleep has once again been elusive. My organs weigh more than they did the day before, swollen with unhappiness, gorged on regret: tiny fists in my stomach pummeling the hanging ball of my heart.

One example of hierophany is the apparition of angels. This is a new word I overheard this morning. It occurs when the divine realm manifests — or the word intrudes — into our quotidian realm. The natural one, an untidy fleshliness of the ordinary. Or the sacred and profane is another way to say this. I asked whether it is a hernia, and the answer was no. A herniated condition is viscera on viscera — a disc, organs, the skin, or nerves. Besides, such a comparison would be profane. A figure of speech already exists, I said, in a hieratic silence of cursive writing long ago dead. Not long ago, those two phrases dwelled in separate worlds. I dare you to use the word hernia in a poem, said a friend. So I not only used the word, I invited God into language. Or God existed before language, while God is also the word. Remember, all theophanies are forms of  hierophany. However, the converse is not always true — not all hierophanies are theophanies — or God visible in our world.

Now his nose’s bridge is broken, one eye will not focus and the other is a stray; trainers whisper in his mouth while one ear listens to itself, clenched like a fist; generally shadowboxing in a smoky room, his mind hides like the aching boys who lost a contest in the Panhellenic games and had to take the back roads home, but someone else, his perfect youth, laureled in newsprint and dollar bills, triumphs forever on the great white way to the statistical Sparta of the champs.