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The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed. It had been in the long grass. I had seen it before, and even fed it, once. Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world Unmendably. Burial was no help: Next morning I got up and it did not. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

Sleepy and suburban at dusk, I learn again the yard’s geometry, edging around the garden and the weedy knots of flowers, circling trees and shrubs, giving a wide berth to the berry patch, heavy and sprawled out of its bounds. Shoving such a machine around a fairway of dandelions, it is easy to feel absurd. The average lawn, left alone one hundred years, could become a hardwood forest. An admirable project. Still I carry on, following week on week the same mowing pattern, cutting edges, almost sprinting the last narrow swaths. And tonight, as I mow over the bushels of fallen peaches, sending pits soaring over the neighbors’ fences, seems hardly any different. But on one crooked march I walk across the thin hidden hole to a yellowjacket hive. The blade pulls them up from their deep sweet chamber just as my bare legs go by. A bee lands heavily, all blunder and revenge, and the sting is a quick embrace and release, like the dared kid’s run and touch of a blind man. I’m blind now with the shock and pain of it, howling in a sprint toward the house, the mower flopped on its side, wild blade loose in the darkening air. Later, the motor sputtered quiet, starved by tilt, I’m back in the twilight, a half-dozen stings packed in wet tobacco, carrying a can of gasoline, a five-foot torch. The destruction is easy: shove can slow to entranceway lip, pull back and light torch, use torch to tip can. One low whump and it’s over. A few flaming drones flutter out and fall. Stragglers, late returners, cruise wide circles around the ruins. In the cool September night they fly or die. In the morning I finish my chores. All the way to winter the blackened hole remains. On Christmas Eve a light late snow covers it and all the lawn’s other imperfections: crabgrass hummocks, high maple roots, the mushroom-laden fairy ring that defies obliteration and appears every spring more visible than ever. Standing in the window, the scent of pine powerful around me, the snap of wood undoing itself in the stove, I wonder at this thin and cold camouflage, falling, gradually falling over what has gone and grown before. And I hear that other rattle and report, that engine driven by another fire. I think of a gold that is sweet and unguent, a gold that is a blaze of years behind me. I hear wind in its regular passes blowing across the roof, feel in my legs a minute and icy tingling, as though I have stood too long in one place or made again another wrong step, as though the present itself were a kind of memory, coiled, waiting, dying to be seen from tomorrow.

There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

I turn around. I feel Monday’s well-shaven face lightly caress my left shoulder most cherished part most crucial here and now

CV Not-Orpheus is singing   He sings his nothing   He sings his night He sings all the names   The name of nothing   The only name    Since long ago   He didn’t know it   And knew it in his night All things sing   All names sing   Every tonal difference, every sound   All music in its destruction   In its sublation   Toward which point? The mountain of nothing hovers   Before it crushes us   With its night   With its song In the evening I walked through town with you, Dearest, along the river A clear cold spring evening, the half-moon shone   As if walking in a foreign city Though I recognized parts of it   You said it was almost like walking in Prague, where we would have been if my mother hadn’t fallen ill When we stood by one corner of the Hotel Svea, where I played in a dance band in 1957, the huge flock of jackdaws, in the trees by the bastion near the castle, flew out over the river, in micropolyphonic conversation    As in a piece by Ligeti That night I dreamed I crossed a bridge spanning the river, now very broad The long bridge was swaying, huge ocean swells entering the river from the sea I walked with a girl, kissed her on the mouth, on the opposite bank In the morning you came into my bed, Dear, we slinked like teenagers, so my mother wouldn’t hear us, where she slept, in the room outside ours   She’s already much better I look at my face in the bathroom mirror   Will I manage to go out into the Brain Trucks pass   Traffic goes on, in the great exchange of goods Gulls, trees, people   The degree of virtuality in different goods, the phantasms also in what we eat, conceptions of origin, contents, effects Fear    Cultivated tastes    We are in the immediacy of memory    Only in a flash of astonishment can memory be broken   But even lightning is informed    I look at the magical diagrams of Giordano Bruno, read his texts   See that all this is exactly as in Jung, fundamental magical forms, for guiding the divine, the unknown within the soul   Also the similarity with tantric forms Yes, that’s how it is, I think, both Freud and Jung are magicians, the difference in rationality is only marginal, Jung’s a little older, Freud’s more modern, a continuation of Descartes, developed later in Spinoza’s pneumatic model for the passions, and yet both are found, subsumed in Bruno’s love-flow, the lineage backward, the tantric flow, also Plato’s Diotima, her flow . . . Hölderlin saw the stream of people in dark water, streaming over the ledges in the human-geological world, the levels of the abyss,   Para- dise’s various degrees of stasis What use can I make of these magical forms? I’m no magician    And yet I acknowledge their power, also within my self   If they prevail, sovereignty is crushed   Libero arbitrio   There the forms also break down The stream of love breaks down    Fluid lightning    The flash of vibrating being But also the flash of darkness   The light of Beatrice’s eyes, their lightning flash   How am I to understand this? How to understand unknowing   That I do not!

For years he lived close enough to smell chicken and bananas rotting in the trash bins, to surprise a cashier on break smoking something suspicious when he walked out the back gate. Did they have an account? He can’t remember. Probably so, for all the milk a large family went through, the last-minute ingredients delivered by a smirking bag boy. He liked to go himself, the parking lot’s radiant heat erased once he got past the sweating glass door, to troll the icy aisles in his slippers. This was before high-end labels took over shelf space, before baloney changed its name to mortadella, before water came in flavors, before fish got flown in from somewhere else.

In the end she just wanted the house and a horse not much more what if  he didn’t own the house or worse not even a horse how do we separate the things from a man the man from the things is a man still the same without his reins here it rains every fifteen minutes it would be foolish to marry a man without an umbrella did Cinderella really love the prince or just the prints on the curtains in the ballroom once I went window- shopping but I didn’t want a window when do you know it’s time to get a new man one who can win more things at the fair I already have four stuffed pandas from the fair I won fair and square is it time to be less square to wear something more revealing in North and South

Old Eben Flood, climbing alone one night Over the hill between the town below And the forsaken upland hermitage That held as much as he should ever know On earth again of home, paused warily. The road was his with not a native near; And Eben, having leisure, said aloud, For no man else in Tilbury Town to hear: "Well, Mr. Flood, we have the harvest moon Again, and we may not have many more; The bird is on the wing, the poet says, And you and I have said it here before. Drink to the bird." He raised up to the light The jug that he had gone so far to fill, And answered huskily: "Well, Mr. Flood, Since you propose it, I believe I will." Alone, as if enduring to the end A valiant armor of scarred hopes outworn, He stood there in the middle of the road Like Roland's ghost winding a silent horn. Below him, in the town among the trees, Where friends of other days had honored him, A phantom salutation of the dead Rang thinly till old Eben's eyes were dim. Then, as a mother lays her sleeping child Down tenderly, fearing it may awake, He set the jug down slowly at his feet With trembling care, knowing that most things break; And only when assured that on firm earth It stood, as the uncertain lives of men Assuredly did not, he paced away, And with his hand extended paused again: "Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this In a long time; and many a change has come To both of us, I fear, since last it was We had a drop together. Welcome home!" Convivially returning with himself, Again he raised the jug up to the light; And with an acquiescent quaver said: "Well, Mr. Flood, if you insist, I might. "Only a very little, Mr. Flood— For auld lang syne. No more, sir; that will do." So, for the time, apparently it did, And Eben evidently thought so too; For soon amid the silver loneliness Of night he lifted up his voice and sang, Secure, with only two moons listening, Until the whole harmonious landscape rang— "For auld lang syne." The weary throat gave out, The last word wavered; and the song being done, He raised again the jug regretfully And shook his head, and was again alone. There was not much that was ahead of him, And there was nothing in the town below— Where strangers would have shut the many doors That many friends had opened long ago.

I know a funny little man, As quiet as a mouse, Who does the mischief that is done In everybody’s house! There’s no one ever sees his face, And yet we all agree That every plate we break was cracked By Mr. Nobody. ’Tis he who always tears out books, Who leaves the door ajar, He pulls the buttons from our shirts, And scatters pins afar; That squeaking door will always squeak, For prithee, don’t you see, We leave the oiling to be done By Mr. Nobody. He puts damp wood upon the fire That kettles cannot boil; His are the feet that bring in mud, And all the carpets soil. The papers always are mislaid; Who had them last, but he? There’s no one tosses them about But Mr. Nobody.

Upon reading PM newspaper’s account of Mr. Roosevelt’s statement on the recent race clashes:“I share your feeling that the recent outbreaks of violence in widely spread parts of the country endanger our national unity and comfort our enemies. I am sure that every true American regrets this.” What’d you get, black boy, When they knocked you down in the gutter, And they kicked your teeth out, And they broke your skull with clubs And they bashed your stomach in? What’d you get when the police shot you in the back, And they chained you to the beds While they wiped the blood off? What’d you get when you cried out to the Top Man? When you called on the man next to God, so you thought, And asked him to speak out to save you? What’d the Top Man say, black boy? “Mr. Roosevelt regrets. . . . . . .”