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The fence was down. Out among humid smells and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands. Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer's woods or coyotes might have got them, or the far road. I remember the night, the moon-colored grass we waded through to look for them, the oaks tangled and dark, like starting a story midway. We gazed over seed heads to the barn toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue moving without sound as if charmed by the moon beholding them out of bounds. Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn. The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow and the story unravels, the sunlight creeping back like a song with nobody left to hear it.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, And spills the upper boulders in the sun; And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean, No one has seen them made or heard them made, But at spring mending-time we find them there. I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; And on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again. We keep the wall between us as we go. To each the boulders that have fallen to each. And some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance: "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" We wear our fingers rough with handling them. Oh, just another kind of out-door game, One on a side. It comes to little more: There where it is we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard. My apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours." Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head: "Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him, But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees. He will not go behind his father's saying, And he likes having thought of it so well He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

God made everything out of nothing; but the nothing shows through —Paul Valéry Lost from all angles but the sun’s, This woken morning, It clicks its brilliance into place at once, If you follow the fall of light— A spider web, head-high, adorning The woodshed’s entrance like a sheet Of gold-shot fabric, metal-tight, That, even so, one handswipe could delete, Collapsing all That spacious architecture to a tacky ball. It brings to mind the mathematician’s Monstrous idea, The Menger sponge, where infinite excisions Out of a solid cube delete Its substance while its form stays clear: The central ninth is cut from a square; Eight smaller squares remain; repeat For each; and so on with this lattice of air: A formula For zero volume, infinite surface area. Enough. The estuary’s slung Like gold-shot cloth Over a gulf of shifting airs. Among Cloud-drifts of beaten eggwhite floats, As though confected of such froth, The mountain. Like a Chinese screen, The fabric of the view devotes Almost all blankness to this hanging scene, This one handsweep Of water, creased like the cheek of someone roused from sleep.

Home from school at six years old, first grade, And uncle there to tell me Mommy Gone, Mommy not be coming back any Time soon, Liam, Mommy had to go to Mental hospital. Nervous breakdown. Years later Mommy, when she gets out Of mental, often says, “If you’re A bad boy for me Liam you’re Going to send me back, back Into mental hospital, like you did First time.” At 13 I find out Mom had been doing years In a federal prison all that time, For stealing, so no mental hospital for Mommy. Breakdown ours alone. I was on my own.

I King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne. ‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’ IV I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots and endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my time: where the mole shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe. V So much for the elves’ wergild, the true governance of England, the gaunt warrior-gospel armoured in engraved stone. I wormed my way heavenward for ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern. Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground: my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on outings—I who was taken to be a king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one. VI The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall to their freedom, I dug and hoarded. Orchards fruited above clefts. I drank from honeycombs of chill sandstone. ‘A boy at odds in the house, lonely among brothers.’ But I, who had none, fostered a strangeness; gave myself to unattainable toys. Candles of gnarled resin, apple-branches, the tacky mistletoe. ‘Look’ they said and again ‘look.’ But I ran slowly; the landscape flowed away, back to its source. In the schoolyard, in the cloakrooms, the children boasted their scars of dried snot; wrists and knees garnished with impetigo. X He adored the desk, its brown-oak inlaid with ebony, assorted prize pens, the seals of gold and base metal into which he had sunk his name. It was there that he drew upon grievances from the people; attended to signatures and retributions; forgave the death-howls of his rival. And there he exchanged gifts with the Muse of History. What should a man make of remorse, that it might profit his soul? Tell me. Tell everything to Mother, darling, and God bless. He swayed in sunlight, in mild dreams. He tested the little pears. He smeared catmint on his palm for his cat Smut to lick. He wept, attempting to master ancilla and servus. XI Coins handsome as Nero’s; of good substance and weight.Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers. They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king’s face. Exactness of design was to deter imitation; mutilation if that failed. Exemplary metal, ripe for commerce. Value from a sparse people, scrapers of salt-pans and byres. Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring. It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger. He reigned forty years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil. Heathland, new-made watermeadow. Charlock, marsh-marigold. Crepitant oak forest where the boar furrowed black mould, his snout intimate with worms and leaves. XV Tutting, he wrenched at a snarled root of dead crabapple. It rose against him. In brief cavort he was Cernunnos, the branched god, lightly concussed. He divided his realm. It lay there like a dream. An ancient land, full of strategy. Ramparts of compost pioneered by red-helmeted worms. Hemlock in ambush, night-soil, tetanus. A wasps’ nest ensconced in the hedge-bank, a reliquary or wrapped head, the corpse of Cernunnos pitching dayward its feral horns. XVI Clash of salutation. As keels thrust into shingle. Ambassadors, pilgrims. What is carried over? The Frankish gift, two-edged, regaled with slaughter. The sword is in the king’s hands; the crux a craftsman’s triumph. Metal effusing its own fragrance, a variety of balm. And other miracles, other exchanges. Shafts from the winter sun homing upon earth’s rim. Christ’s mass: in the thick of a snowy forest the flickering evergreen fissured with light. Attributes assumed, retribution entertained. What is borne amongst them? Too much or too little. Indulgences of bartered acclaim; an expenditure, a hissing. Wine, urine and ashes. XXVII ‘Now when King Offa was alive and dead’, they were all there, the funereal gleemen: papal legate and rural dean; Merovingian car-dealers, Welsh mercenaries; a shuffle of house-carls. He was defunct. They were perfunctory. The ceremony stood acclaimed. The mob received memorial vouchers and signs. After that shadowy, thrashing midsummer hail-storm, Earth lay for a while, the ghost-bride of livid Thor, butcher of strawberries, and the shire-tree dripped red in the arena of its uprooting. XXX And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk towards us             he vanished he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of red mud.

The day ended badly with a broken ankle, a jinxed printer, and a dead car. The dry yellow grass against the sunset saved me. Roosters pranced across a lawn of shit, proudly plumed in black feathers, bobbing before the gray goats. It was the first day I saw god in the quiet, and found a mustard seed was very small. There I had been for years cursing “why?” and all the gold in the sun fell upon me. There was a white mare in the midst of brown smog, majestic in the refinery clouds. Even the radio wouldn’t work! My mother limps and her hair falls out. The faithful drive white Chevy trucks or yellow Camrys, and I’m here golden on the smoking shock-less bus. I lost language in this want, each poem dust, Spanish fluttered as music across the desert, even weeds tumbled unloved. The police sirens seared the coming night, dogs howled helplessly sad. Lo I walk the valley of death, love lingers in my hard eyes. Mañana never comes just right. I mend myself in the folds of paper songs, ring my paper bells for empty success.Quiero Nada, if I sing long enough, I’ll grow dreamlike and find a flock of pigeons, white under wings lifting awkward bodies like doves across the silky blue-white sky.

THAT ONE , is a poet for all poets AH ,then I would suppose to be an edwin for all edwins

Turning to weightless implements of gear-click hedging in instamatic blue, our ticking gaze in light like waves, overturning A lifeline, a forerunning wake of life rafts and instruments, luminal seconds in cesium skimmed threshold or eleventh hour draped across the doorjamb. We lack fear of flatness or our impalement on axes, blinking a reticle of stasis: turn it over and begin again, this dripping like TV test patterns. Let’s stay, I say, and buoy ourselves in river locks intercalated in channels or our fender-bent synapses, recycling this floating. Never believing in water torture or autisms as misfortune, we were counting gold in a pointillistic landscape of radiating boulevards. In Budapest, a necropolis of shifting foci grid-dots. Soviet heroes, missing limbs. The thought does not sadden us, but the calculation of sundials: whether flat or equatorial they always deliver this sublimating ice (we are tapping on the ceiling)

In Love, if Love be Love, if Love be ours, Faith and unfaith can ne’er be equal powers: Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all. It is the little rift within the lute, That by and by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all. The little rift within the lover’s lute, Or little pitted speck in garner’d fruit, That rotting inward slowly moulders all. It is not worth the keeping: let it go: But shall it? answer, darling, answer, no. And trust me not at all or all in all.

The spell is a mouth’s perilous-o as they dark circle the boats in their most resplendent pliable armor. The concept fish aligning with girl or love with death to bring down men at sea,temptation confused into offering, the mismatch of like plus unlike really likes, straight to rock bottom. No equation has ever been this badass. It’s the men who will enter the spell so far into exhaustion as weather, as waves, the tide pulling toward if, letting go then over the whale road in the company of the dolphin, the only other animal, I’m told, who can do it solely for pleasure. It. You know what I mean. The lower half aglitter, the top half brainy as beautiful is sometimes, murderous lovelies, their plotting and resolve and why not get these guys good, the lechers. To see at all in the whirling, to hear what anyone might in wind roar and faint whistle — don’t worry about girls shrewd as whimsy, legend-tough to the core. Don’t. But it’s their spell too, isn’t it? Locked there. Aligned with singing, dazzle razor-blackened green. Not that they miss what human is like or know any end to waters half born to, from where they look up. Men in boats, so sick of the journey. Men gone stupid with blue, with vast, with gazing over and away the whole time until same to same-old to now they’re mean. After that, small. Out there, the expanse. In here, the expanse. The men look down. Aching misalignment — gorgeous lure that hides its hook steely sweet to o my god, little fool’s breath triumphant, all the way under and am I not deserving?