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All those years—almost a hundred— the farm had hard water. Hard orange. Buckets lined in orange. Sink and tub and toilet, too, once they got running water. And now, in less than a lifetime, just by changing the well’s location, in the same yard, mind you, the water’s soft, clear, delicious to drink. All those years to shake your head over. Look how sweet life has become; you can see it in the couple who live here, their calmness as they sit at their table, the beauty as they offer you new water to drink.

Looking out at a man’s name on a battered wingtip in strong winds; was it planned that when the cheap wing bends, the name stays steady? What if it didn’t matter how much you trod over the body of your mother, what happened when you were younger, how you tried forgetting and forgot to forgive. Something has to hold you: numbers, columns, cards to swipe, books to shelve, pints to pour. A life filled with fixed wings, with hard grasps, with the grateful. What’s worth keeping? Not the sad boy who blamed you for all the ways he was broken. Not the man’s name on the wing, but why not the battered wing itself. Why not the woman thinking. Why not the river below, its lips wet, footprints animal. What forked tongues come when clouds crack open, when this sky’s watched you sleep all day, and now lets down its darkness. There’s all night to stay awake.

a child carrying flowers walks toward the new year a conductor tattooing darkness listens to the shortest pause hurry a lion into the cage of music hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse moving in parallel nights who's the visitor? when the days all tip from nests and fly down roads the book of failure grows boundless and deep each and every moment's a shortcut I follow it through the meaning of the East returning home, closing death's door

Last night something tunneled through the elms. But at sunrise, I found just white light biting my eyelids, salt rubbed on a wound. Batons of ice fell from power lines, soundless but still emphatic. Then the rain churned the snow to soap scum, waxing cars with winter’s lichen, patchy in the strange uneven fur of newborns. And still, I was childless. One cardinal lodged on a branch: a blood-drop striking water before the slow dispersion.

The rain this morning falls on the last of the snow and will wash it away. I can smell the grass again, and the torn leaves being eased down into the mud. The few loves I’ve been allowed to keep are still sleeping on the West Coast. Here in Virginia I walk across the fields with only a few young cows for company. Big-boned and shy, they are like girls I remember from junior high, who never spoke, who kept their heads lowered and their arms crossed against their new breasts. Those girls are nearly forty now. Like me, they must sometimes stand at a window late at night, looking out on a silent backyard, at one rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls of other people’s houses. They must lie down some afternoons and cry hard for whoever used to make them happiest, and wonder how their lives have carried them this far without ever once explaining anything. I don’t know why I’m walking out here with my coat darkening and my boots sinking in, coming up with a mild sucking sound I like to hear. I don’t care where those girls are now. Whatever they’ve made of it they can have. Today I want to resolve nothing. I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it.

1915-1916 I Phantasmal fears, And the flap of the flame, And the throb of the clock, And a loosened slate, And the blind night's drone, Which tiredly the spectral pines intone! II And the blood in my ears Strumming always the same, And the gable-cock With its fitful grate, And myself, alone. III The twelfth hour nears Hand-hid, as in shame; I undo the lock, And listen, and wait For the Young Unknown. IV In the dark there careers — As if Death astride came To numb all with his knock — A horse at mad rate Over rut and stone. V No figure appears, No call of my name, No sound but 'Tic-toc' Without check. Past the gate It clatters — is gone. VI What rider it bears There is none to proclaim; And the Old Year has struck, And, scarce animate, The New makes moan. VII Maybe that 'More Tears! — More Famine and Flame — More Severance and Shock!' Is the order from Fate That the Rider speeds on To pale Europe; and tiredly the pines intone.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations The Christmas twigs crispen crispen To make crisp and needles rattle Along the window-ledge. A solitary pearl Shed from the necklace spilled at last week’s party Lies in the suety, suety Fatty; from suet, an animal fat used in cooking to create tallow snow-luminous plainness Of morning, on the window-ledge beside them. And all the furniture that circled stately And hospitable when these rooms were brimmed With perfumes, furs, and black-and-silver Crisscross of seasonal conversation, lapses Into its previous largeness. I remember Anne’s rose-sweet gravity, and the stiff grave Where cold so little can contain; I mark the queer delightful skull and crossbones Starlings and sparrows left, taking the crust, And the long loop of winter wind Smoothing its arc from dark Arcturus Arcturus The brightest star in the northern sky, located in the constellation Boötes down To the bricked corner of the drifted courtyard, And the still window-ledge. Gentle and just pleasure It is, being human, to have won from space This unchill, unchill Warmed, thawed habitable interior Which mirrors quietly the light Of the snow, and the new year.

I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother’s hairpin. With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap, I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet of the moonlight over the blue plums of my wife’s breasts. With the new planet I discovered just when I thought I was losing my sight, I will love another man because I will be a woman. Everything important will never as yet have happened. Let it happen. I will throw a lit match on the secrets my body has kept from me and stand in the fire. The people I have sawed in half will appear in my bedroom mirror, getting dressed.

Rosh-Hashanah, 5643 Not while the snow-shroud round dead earth is rolled, And naked branches point to frozen skies.— When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold, The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn A sea of beauty and abundance lies, Then the new year is born. Look where the mother of the months uplifts In the green clearness of the unsunned West, Her ivory horn of plenty, dropping gifts, Cool, harvest-feeding dews, fine-winnowed light; Tired labor with fruition, joy and rest Profusely to requite. Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all. The red, dark year is dead, the year just born Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob, To what undreamed-of morn? For never yet, since on the holy height, The Temple’s marble walls of white and green Carved like the sea-waves, fell, and the world’s light Went out in darkness,—never was the year Greater with portent and with promise seen, Than this eve now and here. Even as the Prophet promised, so your tent Hath been enlarged unto earth’s farthest rim. To snow-capped Sierras from vast steppes ye went, Through fire and blood and tempest-tossing wave, For freedom to proclaim and worship Him, Mighty to slay and save. High above flood and fire ye held the scroll, Out of the depths ye published still the Word. No bodily pang had power to swerve your soul: Ye, in a cynic age of crumbling faiths, Lived to bear witness to the living Lord, Or died a thousand deaths. In two divided streams the exiles part, One rolling homeward to its ancient source, One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart. By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled, Each separate soul contains the nation’s force, And both embrace the world. Kindle the silver candle’s seven rays, Offer the first fruits of the clustered bowers, The garnered spoil of bees. With prayer and praise Rejoice that once more tried, once more we prove How strength of supreme suffering still is ours For Truth and Law and Love.

Up on the roof, waiting for the fireworks to begin in warm winter rain, a moment ago I stepped from the elevator into the black air of an almost New Year and need a minute to catch my breath at the spread of city open to my eye. I can't go to the edge; I never could. The old fear of height still troubles me, the sensation that nothing can be under me if I am surrounded by mist and rain and all of the dark night air we breathe. Even a glimpse at the treetops in the park, with its slick crisscrossing roads that plunge into the jumbled panorama of East Side Manhattan, hysterical tonight with its own incandescence, gives me the willies. I feel as if I were standing on the deck of a showboat of a cloud as it drifts down some dark river, waiting for it to bang into some other building's fifteenth floor. How can these old people hunch the railing, hoisting their plastic glasses of champagne from under dripping umbrellas, as if they drank the rain as they laugh their analyses of the weather? Maybe now, like me, they have nothing to lose. I moved in three weeks ago; this is my first trip to the roof. I don't want to die tonight, the first fatality of 1990! There's too much of me I left in pieces last year, oh, the whole last decade: But I'm up here to distract myself, temporarily, from what I don't want or can't have in the way of love. . . . That must be the Triborough Bridge, tied in its strings of blue lights, and I can see in Central Park the skating rink, like a scoured mirror below, where some madman waves a red lantern; he must be drunk. I have only sipped a speck of Drambuie, which I didn't carry in my Coca-Cola glass up to these festivities. This is the first New Year's I've spent alone in twenty, twenty-two years. I never could go to the edge; but I did. Out there in the dark: my marriage, the woman I loved badly, as she did me, or none too well; the places we lived; the apartment I once half-owned; the thousands of books I had to leave behind (though I am to be granted library privileges) and the black and white cat I really miss. My wife's with her friends tonight somewhere in Brooklyn; friends of mine out there, too, though I don't know where. It's just like me to move in the middle of a telephone company strike. Thus, no calls from anyone—and I don't even have a telephone yet, so who could call? Damp but trying to smile, I eye the revelers. Two young men and their enormous girlfriends have joined us, really large women who carry balloons, all ready to froth in merry champagne. We check our watches to the screams from swarms of apartment windows to the west as the sky lights up with the first furious bombardment of colored shells. I can see that red lantern swinging toward the rockets—aha! So it wasn't a drunk, but the fireworks engineer preparing to blow the year's last sky to smithereens for our delight! I like to follow the tiny spurts of flame from the launching pad in their heavenward trajectory as much as I like the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, which give proof to the night that I am still here, hands jammed in the pockets of my sodden raincoat, face dripping with rain, hat soaked, wondering if the skinny guy in the army jacket behind me (who looks just like I did in the sixties) is mumbling his way into a combat flashback and ready to hurl me over the edge of the roof and into kingdom come. I guess not yet. We've survived the first blasts of spinning green, corkscrews of spangled flame, buds of fireballs spewed in arching gold sprays, the whistling fire-fish that curl and howl as they flare, falling to ash. Screaming its head off, the New York New Year enters. I feel sad that beautiful things must die, even shadows made of smoke and flame, whatever I thought I had made out of my life— music, poems, books, kisses, a little useless fame. The army guy behind me grumbles at the haze of rocket smoke that coils around the trees, then tumbles up into the air toward Harlem. That bump and thud and bump sound everywhere, more clouds smacking each other head-on. The flashes of the explosions are close enough to touch if you wanted to burn your fingers on the sky, and the glare rocks our shadows back against the brick, as if chaos snapped our pictures in the dark. I smile for my portrait, curious at the New Year, smelling the acrid smoke of the one we've just destroyed. Then I squeeze into the tiny elevator car with the others, anonymous, reconciled to be so, back to my little apartment and the waiting glass of amber drink I'll raise, only half in jest, to my new life.