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“Say it enough times and it's August.” —Geoffrey G. O'Brien, “Three Years” On a set you need bush rebels, that numbing little chair while passing. If we knock 'em out seven precincts are going to show up. It looks like you don't need oil. I think it'll be fine. Did she think that might be good, or for the man who listens to it, nothing to be done or thought, (section pending)? Or for the man who listens to it, an abrupt yawn, history or the other. Home economics.  Dr. Singalong can't find his way back. I don't know about that, but at her lamps do you still see the awkward ceremony, too serious? Leave it that way, imperfect start beyond where I was going. Prison outside the perpetual sonata, the only anxiety, since you wonder what they don't do, from your red zero heart page waiting to touch your face. Although they know about it and it literally doesn't exist, no, stay up and go to sleep, unless it falls on the right side of the brain positioned for so many forgeries, moon nugget... I don't cut 'em any slack. Assault on a clean front, that's a lot to be turning into. These residents, they start throwing 'em early. Continue to open your door to mud! Take the noon balloon to Rangoon, gutta percha academy, to the place of ice cream, because, really, what difference does it make? When it was time you went home. Tears and flowers, see how dirty your hands are. We had a lovely dime. Soon it will be seven I ask you.

The ampalaya, no matter how bitter, Is sweet to those who like it. The hardest person to awaken Is a lover feigning sleep. The basketball held underwater Wants violently to come up. Easily split asunder is that Which never was united. The water is cold at first, for it Takes time to heat the pipe. The kids run away from home, only to Sit through endless classes. You take the battery out of a watch, You turn it into a liar. You strip the sheet off a drinking straw And stab it into the scalp. The basketball held underwater Wants violently to come up. The one who reads the sutra is not The one who knows what is said. My life is as unchanging As the surface of the moon. And I give you the same reason: I have no atmosphere. El hacha ya está puesta A la raíz de los árboles, Y todo árbol que no produzca buen fruto Is hewn down and cast into the fire. You take a rose by the throat. How much blood comes out your hand Is how recklessly you took hold, Is how shamelessly. Who wants to be great or holy Has no lust for peace. For peace is a thread only spools on a thing That’s good for nothing else.

Has it coming, the pest. Gets irritated, the stuck up. Gets approval, the dimpled. Gets cold, the talk. The sidewalk separates from the curb. Frogs peek out there. There are passages there, channels. Gardens, orderly, get respect; no one hurts them. Only animals, insects, beings without comprehension. A house on a corner lot, good to look up at from the corner, compels. Branches of live oak reach across the way. There must be acorns, black, green, green with earth yellow. The wind cools the walker. There is nothing to stop the wind up. It finds every walker in its path, cools him, cools her. Director must direct and make decisions. Buildings on the edges of developments look out over edges. The other world never nearer. Between towns, roads are lonely. Lonely, too, who cannot bear being lied to. The angry become less intelligent. Do and undo, the day is long enough. Liars do not think they are lying; that’s how they do it. The nut gives way to the teeth; the teeth crush it. Smashed frog in the parking lot turns colors, becomes flat, extends its fingers, does not come back to life when it rains, yet disappears. Wonderfully, beliefs antedate evidence. Wonderfully, people seldom believe a thing unless they already wanted it. Many cry when signaled, not pursuant to cognition. What is offered as proof is suspect. Summer makes strategic. Strategy is a pleasure. Whatever people say, to obey, of itself, does not hurt. Stray feline must lie in shade, under tree, distrust her well-wisher first. Grackle must shelter under car, direct its thirsty attention to the water there. Cut of meat must lose its color on the fire, exchange it, be seasoned. To be accused, rightly or wrongly, feels the same. Old man must speak against his own best interests, for he cannot swallow his complaints, not all of them. Glassware touching glassware gets chipped, broken into triangles, in the move. Vital sheet of paper must sometimes be lost. Papers are many. The thing learned at length, the memorized rigmarole, must fade from memory, in time. The kind word given unexpectedly is good. The hearer must be relieved. The thought that nothing can ever go right again must depart for a time. The light must change. The waiting person wait longer. The walker must step out of the summer heat wet to the hair roots, the shirt wet. The sky is the same but seems grander where no buildings are. Colored clouds are remarked; white ones less. One’s looks, one’s skin color matter less if money has its feet in it. The hated one, the cheated many, are the poor. Lean grackle must stalk a branch, mouth open like scissors. Striped raptors, wings in fixed positions, must kite, must circle. Beautiful Soul wants a world in which he or she has no place. Godspeed, sweet intent. Love will creep where it cannot go. Stick-figure reptiles, black, must cross the sidewalk by the pool, dartingly. They weigh one paperclip. Beauty enslaves on contact. Better have it than hear of it. Sweet and cunningly seldom meet. In dragging a bamboo tree, one must snatch it by the eyebrows. The rusty sword and the empty purse plead performance of covenants. Even Graceful must sometimes, in putting on her coat, sweep everything off the table and into the floor. If many strike on an anvil, they must in meter. He, only, pursues honesty honestly, who has destroyed any possibility of good repute. Whether you boil snow or pound it, you can only have water out of it. Cities must have boulevards, vast channels not possible or dangerous to cross. There must be holes in the decomposing concrete, paint invisible at sunrise and sunset, guardrails, median strips, shrines. The student must wait to do the assignment, wait beyond the advisable point, stay up against a deadline. Must turn in a paper never read, not by the writer, not by the friend. Must muster, thunder, one or two times in a life, a sound to frighten the unfrightenable. Must pour, from the sky, rarely, chips and balls and coins and smooth clusters of partly white, partly clear ice. Some believe, helplessly. Others, less. Some count, tabulate, helplessly. They check calendars. They can’t shake it. Winter travels, hides, shelters. It pursues the lightly dressed into buildings during summer. It lies in wait in restaurants, miscalculates. The pill and its coating, obnoxious to the child, are welcome enough to the grown swallower. First deserve and then desire. Blow first and sip afterwards. The wise let it go a great deal. Sorrow is wondrously clinging; clouds glide. The friend who comes apologizing and promising must be received. He is sorry and not sorry and sorry. Courage comes up. Sacrifice, oftener. The disintegrating parking lot is witness to the exchange. Drugs are traded, caresses. The dog in its heavy coat must lie, half dead, on the porch. Eyes like a bear, tongue like a lion, lethargy. One must consciously retire. Comes off a train none but was on it. The heirloom ring, wrong-gendered, trash, gets rescued. When the spirit of praising is upon him, a man will judge linen by candlelight. Burr oaks yield fewer fruit, but bigger, shag-capped. One must consciously retire. A helve must fit its ax head. Most laugh before understanding. Fame is best.

. . . . . tell you? ha! who can tell another how to manage the swimming? he was right: people don’t change. They only stand more revealed. I, likewise 1 the light, there, at the corner (because of the big elm and the reflecting houses) winter or summer stays as it was when they lived there, in the house the street cuts off as though it were a fault, the side’s so sheer they hid, or tried to hide, the fact the cargo their ships brought back was black (the Library, too, possibly so founded). The point is the light does go one way toward the post office, and quite another way down to Main Street. Nor is that all: coming from the sea, up Middle, it is more white, very white as it passes the grey of the Unitarian church. But at Pleasant Street, it is abruptly black (hidden city 2 Or now, when such houses are not built, or such trees planted, it’s the doctor knows what the parents don’t know. Or the wife doesn’t, of the husband, or the husband, of the other. Sins, they still call them, and let pejorocracy thrive. Only the lady has got it straight. She looks as the best of my people look in one direction, her direction, they know it is elements men stand in the midst of, not these names supported by that false future she, precisely she, has her foot upon (He made the coast, and though he lost his feet for it, and the hands he’d purposely allowed to freeze to the oars, I knew him, drank with my elders, in his own bar, a toast to him Or my other, the top of whose head a bollard clean took away. It was four days before they could get him to Chelsea Marine. This spring I listened to him as good as new, as fresh as it’s always been to hear him talk of the sea. He was puttering in his garden when I came up, looking over his Santa Fe rose. And he took off his hat to show me, how it is all skin where his skull was, too much of a hole for even the newest metal to cover Or the quiet one, who’s died since (died as deck-watchman, on his vessel, in port). Years ago I heard from others how he’d pulled two men out of the sea one night off Eastern Point. They’d not been able to shed their jacks when the ship went over, and when he caught them they were going down too. He hauled them into Brace’s Cove, even though the shore wasn’t there, it was such a storm and the sea so big it had turned the Lily Pond into an arm of itself. Last, he with muscle as big as his voice, the strength of him in that blizzard to have pulled the trawl slack from the very bottom and released his mate from the cod-hook had him out, and almost off, into the snow. It wasn’t that there was so much sea. It was the cold, and that white, until over the dory went and the two of them, one still, were in. The wild thing was, he made the vessel, three miles, and fetched her, found that vessel in all that weather, with his fellow dead weight on him. The sort of eye which later knew the Peak of Brown’s as though it were his own garden (as Bowditch brought the Eppie Sawyer spot to her wharf a Christmas morning) 3 Which is the cream of the milk, of course. And the milk also of the matter, the most of it, those who do no more than drink it in a cup of tea alone of such a night, holding (as she) a certain schooner What still is, in other words. And the remarkable part of it, that it still goes on, still is what counts: the lad from the Fort who recently bought the small white house on Lower Middle (the one diagonally across from the handsome brick with the Bullfinch door) He stood with me one Sunday and eyed (with a like eye) a curious ship we’d both come on, tied to the Gas Company wharf. She had raked masts, and they were unstepped, fitted loose in her deck, like a neck in a collar. He was looking idly, as I was, saying nothing. When suddenly, he turned to a Gloucesterman, a big one, berthed alongside this queer one, and said: “I’ll own her, one day” 4 While she stares, out of her painted face, no matter the deathly mu-sick, the demand will arouse some of these men and women

I have had to learn the simplest things last. Which made for difficulties. Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross a wet deck. The sea was not, finally, my trade. But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged from that which was most familiar. Was delayed, and not content with the man’s argument that such postponement is now the nature of obedience, that we are all late in a slow time, that we grow up many And the single is not easily known It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote) I note in others, makes more sense than my own distances. The agilities they show daily who do the world’s businesses And who do nature’s as I have no sense I have done either I have made dialogues, have discussed ancient texts, have thrown what light I could, offered what pleasures doceat allows But the known? This, I have had to be given, a life, love, and from one man the world. Tokens. But sitting here I look out as a wind and water man, testing And missing some proof I know the quarters of the weather, where it comes from, where it goes. But the stem of me, this I took from their welcome, or their rejection, of me And my arrogance was neither diminished nor increased, by the communication 2 It is undone business I speak of, this morning, with the sea stretching out from my feet

One of the objects I've treasured most in my life Is this letter scale which, long ago, you gave me. I was an active correspondent at the time, Even sending lots of letters overseas. While still enjoying the pleasure of going to the post, I now had another: assessing exactly, in advance, At my counter, the cost of packets and envelopes, To which, price list in hand, I stuck my stamps. I use it less these days, this quite simple device Graded with little marks up to a whole pound, For my mailings rarely still exceed the price Of an ordinary stamp. The tray of polished metal's now Covered with dust, without the slightest hint That the red pointer marking the weight on the front Has budged. But in the long run, one would, I think, Discern a difference and see how much the months Were worth in terms of dust, the seasons elapsed Since the previous weighing. But having been seized, Suddenly, just this morning, by a tremendous attack (Annual) of cleaning, from which nothing is released, I restored to the tray's slightly concave stainless steel, That ever so slightly distorted mirror, its polished shine. It reflected all of the sky, through which clouds reeled, And I could confirm that space does not weigh more than time.

And in the end, all that is really left Is a feeling—strong and unavoidable— That somehow we deserved something better. That somewhere along the line things Got fouled up. And that letter from whoever’s In charge, which certainly would have set Everything straight between us and the world, Never reached us. Got lost somewhere. Possibly mislaid in some provincial station. Or sent by mistake to an old address Whose new tenant put it on her dresser With the curlers and the hairspray forgetting To give it to the landlord to forward. And we still wait like children who have sent Two weeks’ allowance far away To answer an enticing advertisement From a crumbling, yellow magazine, Watching through years as long as a childhood summer, Checking the postbox with impatient faith Even on days when mail is never brought.

Beloved, men in thick green coats came crunching through the snow, the insignia on their shoulders of uncertain origin, a country I could not be sure of, a salute so terrifying I heard myself lying to avoid arrest, and was arrested along with Jocko, whose tear had snapped off, a tiny icicle he put in his mouth. We were taken to the ice prison, a palace encrusted with hoarfrost, its dome lit from within, Jocko admired the wiring, he kicked the walls to test the strength of his new boots.  A television stood in a block of ice, its blue image still moving like a liquid center. You asked for my innermost thoughts.  I wonder will I ever see a grape again?  When I think of the vineyard where we met in October—when you dropped a cluster custom insisted you be kissed by a stranger—how after the harvest we plunged into a stream so icy our palms turned pink.  It seemed our future was sealed.  Everyone said so.  It is quiet here.  Not closing our ranks weakens us hugely.  The snowflakes fall in a featureless bath.  I am the stranger who kissed you.  On sunny days each tree is a glittering chandelier.  The power of mindless beauty!  Jocko told a joke and has been dead since May.  A bullethole in his forehead the officers call a third eye.  For a month I milked a barnful of cows.  It is a lot like cleansing a chandelier.  Wipe and polish, wipe and polish, round and round you go. I have lost my spectacles.  Is the book I was reading still open by the side of our bed?  Treat it as a bookmark saving my place in our story. (here the letter breaks off)

I haven't written        in a while because I don't want to talk about anything I've been unable to stop thinking about: the knotted thread of bad capillaries on my retinae, money, or that my morning was ruined by the unusual tightness of jeans around my thighs, like the obligations of having a body so ill-fitting, oppressively snug around an obstinate will. And while       I don't want to be distracted from this Duchamp thing I've been working on—     I am itched out of reverie over and over again by this feeling I don't deserve my raptures anymore. So I'm sorry. I don't want to bring you down. It's unfair to have to hear about needles and envelopes and flies when you might just have been enjoying an iced tea outside and when I would prefer to tell you, really, there's a family of pheasant living in the massive cottonwood we call the Tree of Life. The male's red, green, gold plumage makes him look like a Christmas present I would want to give you. So except “I hope you're well,” that's all.

There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened between us, like ostyt, which can be used for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet, which is to want something so much over months and even years that when you get it, you have lost the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky, “It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.” What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men, who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné, so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia, I see what she sees — all my books alphabetized and on shelves, feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins, neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’, and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin, a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.