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Sometimes I say I’m going to meet my sister at the café— even though I have no sister—just because it’s such a beautiful thing to say. I’ve always thought so, ever since I read a novel in which two sisters were constantly meeting in cafés. Today, for example, I walked alone on the wet sidewalk, wearing my rain boots, expecting someone might ask where I was headed. I bought a steno pad and a watch battery, the store windows fogged up. Rain in April is a kind of promise, and it costs nothing. I carried a bag of books to the café and ordered tea. I like a place that’s lit by lamps. I like a place where you can hear people talk about small things, like the difference between azure and cerulean, and the price of tulips. It’s going down. I watched someone who could be my sister walk in, shaking the rain from her hair. I thought, even now florists are filling their coolers with tulips, five dollars a bundle. All over the city there are sisters. Any one of them could be mine.

morning green through ivy leaves resuscitated on window let us also breathe our own breath and the birds their blood in arrows settle into nest from migration the cloud of their song woke me // stormed in me // a waterfall in the thrush’s call // a star flick ering in the sparrows we are not the woods if we whisper the woods quietly to ourselves we witness our hands walking into the forest we are two rooms who think alone // unless my ear saw the cardinal my eye heard the scarlet tanager I could not show it to you yesterday it existed as I exist now to you or the water pipit bobbing at burble of creek to one musical strand it heard and was harmony of and I saw from my distance the web we step through to enter woods: spider sews one point to branch and leaps where wind carries sews one point of silk to fern and leaps to where wind carries until the web in logic sees the plank in pine do you see the house already built the oak desk I think at the dark cherry night stand for your closed book by the bed we keep a light to turn off do you hear our whole house swaying in the wind those birds are not crying out in fear those birds are singing nuptials outside our house already built in the green canopy the quoin of air illumined always as it illumines let us be truer fact asleep below love a-leap // no cornerstone no cement save song do you hear above us the river strong in leaves the rubble wind flows over and is not wind river the rubblesource the river ripples over to sing us and the silken nest weighs the beech branch down in horror the multi tude breathing in a single lung and one cocoon countless in turns the transparent ever winging itself past hunger glows as we glow is woven of one single thread and no love thinks separate the weaver from the wing I say now I love you with the worm in my mouth spinning my words into your ear and your listening volumes pupa in the elm’s crotch and oak knot do you hear as I hear the old sins blossom from diaries and become the faith leaves live upon we eat not ink but the light that burns in the blank page so ink can more unselfish sing so the wounded deer leaps highest so heart quickens my hand cocooned in your hand to become each one half a wing of luna moth waiting in woods for night’s blossom the moon in borrowed light through dark unfathomed the dead star’s light still lights on leaf a finite edge we loathe the bounded and nowhere witness a cosmos in fetters the woods lit by the lantern blown out our eyes by bright stars no longer thinking love is bright our woods and us some star’s thought so the wild iris angles up in sun so sun is all stars and us the worm whose hunger sated in leaf again becomes hunger insatiable not for fact // this world in which nothing in the eye the instant dead stars cast out countless shrouds morning’s bright pall // Venus ascends ceaseless and wary the weak light one upon the other throws each moon waxing to each moon of the other’s face in full caught not in gazing at light we are what light gazes on lumen ensouling love so sigh so spiders feast by night so whippoorwills cry “poor will” so bobolinks wear the morning sun behind their heads unseen so light divides in two the star light sprang from and sews together again that star in us your sweet moan moon your linger languor your tongue on your lips not to speak so the moon glows on your lips in me the jack in pulpit blooms by night so I bloom so I give me to you so the appletree in flower proves not fruit but the sun in the mouth of the worm who grammars these woods into this world whose song is

Before the train screamed him through tunnels to his windowless office, the idiots he had to "sir," my father needed a space without us, so in a crack of light from the bathroom, he dressed, held his shoes by two fingers, and left us sleeping. That walk to the diner, the last stars fading out, the sky lightening from black to blue to white, was his time. He walked in all weather, let each season touch him all over, lifted his face to rain and sun. He liked to watch the old houses stir awake and nod to the woman in her slippers on 27th, smoking as she strolled her little mutt. To step back, smooth as Fred Astaire, from the paperboy's wild toss. Milk bottles sweated on doorsteps, sweet cream on top, and once, he lifted a quart from its wire basket, drank it down beneath our neighbor's winking porch light, and left the empty on the stoop.

Haze. Three student violists boarding a bus. A clatter of jackhammers. Granular light. A film of sweat for primer and the heat for a coat of paint. A man and a woman on a bench: she tells him he must be psychic, for how else could he sense, even before she knew, that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle on the boil. I never meant, she says. But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi. I’m sorry, she says. The comforts of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon. The sky blurs—there’s a storm coming up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly around a corner. How familiar it feels to feel strange, hollower than a bassoon. A rill of chill air in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.

How must it be to be moss, that slipcover of rocks?— imagine, greening in the dark, longing for north, the silence of birds gone south. How does moss do it, all day in a dank place and never a cough?— a wet dust where light fails, where the chisel cut the name.

I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing into your hair and thinking of nothing. I want to lie down with you under the sails of a wooden sloop and drift away from all of it, our two cars rusting in the parking lot, our families whining like tame geese at feeding time, and all the bosses of the earth cursing the traffic in the morning haze. They will telephone each other from their sofas and glass desks, with no idea where we could be, unable to picture the dark throat of the saxophone playing upriver, or the fire we gather between us on this fantail of dusty light, having stolen a truckload of roses and thrown them into the sea.

In a lightning bolt of memory, I see our statue of Buddha (a wedding gift from Uncle Gene) which always sat on top of the speaker cabinet. When a visitor asked, “So, does Buddha like jazz?” you said, “I hope so. He’s been getting it up the ass for a long time.”

Lincoln, Neb., 2009

Some that have deeper digg'd love's mine than I, Say, where his centric happiness doth lie; I have lov'd, and got, and told, But should I love, get, tell, till I were old, I should not find that hidden mystery. Oh, 'tis imposture all! And as no chemic yet th'elixir got, But glorifies his pregnant pot If by the way to him befall Some odoriferous thing, or medicinal, So, lovers dream a rich and long delight, But get a winter-seeming summer's night. Our ease, our thrift, our honour, and our day, Shall we for this vain bubble's shadow pay? Ends love in this, that my man Can be as happy'as I can, if he can Endure the short scorn of a bridegroom's play? That loving wretch that swears 'Tis not the bodies marry, but the minds, Which he in her angelic finds, Would swear as justly that he hears, In that day's rude hoarse minstrelsy, the spheres. Hope not for mind in women; at their best Sweetness and wit, they'are but mummy, possess'd.

In a tavern on the Southside of Chicago a man sits with his wife. From their corner booth each stares at strangers just beyond the other's shoulder, nodding to the songs of their youth. Tonight they will not fight. Thirty years of marriage sits between them like a bomb. The woman shifts then rubs her right wrist as the man recalls the day when they sat on the porch of her parents' home. Even then he could feel the absence of something desired or planned. There was the smell of a freshly tarred driveway, the slow heat, him offering his future to folks he did not know. And there was the blooming magnolia tree in the distance— its oversized petals like those on the woman's dress, making her belly even larger, her hands disappearing into the folds. When the last neighbor or friend leaves their booth he stares at her hands, which are now closer to his, remembers that there had always been some joy. Leaning closer, he believes he can see their daughter in her eyes.