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When news came that your mother’d smashed her hip, both feet caught in rungs of the banquet table, our wedding rebroken on the memory of the long lake of silence when the stones of her body broke as an Irish fence of stones, I saw your wet dugs drag with the weight of our daughter in the quick of her sleep to another feeding; then the shoulders dropped their broken antenna branches of fear at the knife running the scars which had been born into the colon for the misspent enema, the clubbed liver unclean with the stones of the gall bladder, and the broken arch of hip lugging you to the lake, the dough inner tube of lading swollen with innerpatching. I pick you up from the floor of your ringing fears, the floor where the photographs you have worked into the cool sky of the gray you love, and you are back at the compost pile where the vegetables burn, or swim in the storm of your childhood, when your father egged you on with his open machinery, the exhaust choking your sisters, and your sisters choked still. Now this voice stops you in accusation, and the years pile up on themselves in the eggs of your stretched sons, one born on his birthday, both dead. I pull you off into the sanctuary of conciliation, of quiet tactics, the uttered question, the referral, which will quiet the condition you have seen in your mother’s shadow, the crutches inching in the uncut grass, and the worn body you will carry as your own birthmark of his scream.

Kind are her answers, But her performance keeps no day; Breaks time, as dancers From their own music when they stray: All her free favors And smooth words wing my hopes in vain. O did ever voice so sweet but only feign? Can true love yield such delay, Converting joy to pain? Lost is our freedom, When we submit to women so: Why do we need ’em, When in their best they work our woe? There is no wisdom Can alter ends, by Fate prefixed. O why is the good of man with evil mixed? Never were days yet called two, But one night went betwixt.

Not Delft or delphinium, not Wedgewood among the knickknacks, not wide-eyed chicory evangelizing in the devil strip— But way on down in the moonless octave below midnight, honey, way down where you can't tell cerulean from teal. Not Mason jars of moonshine, not waverings of silk, not the long-legged hunger of a heron or the peacock's iridescent id— But Delilahs of darkness, darling, and the muscle of the mind giving in. Not sullen snow slumped against the garden, not the first instinct of flame, not small, stoic ponds, or the cold derangement of a jealous sea— But bluer than the lips of Lazarus, baby, before Sweet Jesus himself could figure out what else in the world to do but weep.

I’m alone until I’m asleep, and there you are: naked, you take my hand:Shhhh! We tiptoe through a black-blue meadow. To the pond behind the farmhouse. (The farmer sleeps in the blind window.) No cicadas even, maybe just maybe Venus — & this is before Wednesday, everything’s alright, we tiptoe ‘round the house as around a painful subject — & we’re at the pond! And now it’s time. To use vague holy-man speech, like: I am another face in your hand, the face of your eye — wing-surrogates, the word bones— it’s time for afternoon, them white-blank architectures. No, veil. Nothing’s glistening. Christmas, Christmas. It’s time for you to forgive me: I was forced to eat valises that wouldn’t close by themselves — that was just a dream, good morning: regurgitate the stars and the soot

—shored by trees at its far ending, as is the way in moral tales: whether trees as trees actually, for their shadow and what inside of it hides, threatens, calls to; or as ever-wavering conscience, cloaked now, and called Chorus; or, between these, whatever falls upon the rippling and measurable, but none to measure it, thin fabric of this stands for. A kind of meadow, and then trees—many, assembled, a wood therefore. Through the wood the worn path, emblematic of Much Trespass:Halt. Who goes there? A kind of meadow, where it ends begin trees, from whose twinning of late light and the already underway darkness you were expecting perhaps the stag to step forward, to make of its twelve-pointed antlers the branching foreground to a backdrop all branches; or you wanted the usual bird to break cover at that angle at which wings catch entirely what light’s left, so that for once the bird isn’t miracle at all, but the simplicity of patience and a good hand assembling: first the thin bones, now in careful rows the feathers, like fretwork, now the brush, for the laying-on of sheen....As is always the way, you tell yourself,in poems—Yes, always, until you have gone there, and gone there, “into the field,” vowing Only until there’s nothing more I want— thinking it, wrongly, a thing attainable, any real end to wanting, and that it is close, and that it is likely, how will you not this time catch hold of it: flashing, flesh at once lit and lightless, a way out, the one dappled way, back—

I will have been walking away: no matter what direction I intended, at that moment, I will have been walking Away into the direction that you now say I have always intended, no matter what my intention was then, I will have been Walking away, though it will not be clear what it was that I was leaving or even why, it seems that you will say That always, I was walking away, intending a direction that was not towards you, but moving away with every step, Or, even when I pretended to be walking towards you, only making the place for my feet to go backwards, Away, where I will have been walking, always away:   intention and direction unknown, but knowing you will always say I will have been walking away.

The kindergarten concert was an interesting show. Peter walked onto the stage and yelled, “I have to go!” Katie was embarrassed, but she had nowhere to hide. She raised her dress to hide her face. Her mother almost died. Keith removed his tie and said, “It’s ugly, Dad. I hate it!” David picked his nose on stage. What’s worse is that he ate it. They sang their song, and Wyatt burped. Then he did a dance. Michael fell while spinning ’round. Peter wet his pants. The music teacher at the end said, “There, I’m glad that’s done.” The kindergarten bowed and said, “Let’s sing another one!”

For Carol Rigolot When deeds splay before us precious as gold & unused chances stripped from the whine-bone, we know the moment kindheartedness walks in. Each praise be echoes us back as the years uncount themselves, eating salt. Though blood first shaped us on the climbing wheel, the human mind lit by the savanna’s ice star & thistle rose, your knowing gaze enters a room & opens the day, saying we were made for fun. Even the bedazzled brute knows when sunlight falls through leaves across honed knives on the table. If we can see it push shadows aside, growing closer, are we less broken? A barometer, temperature gauge, a ruler in minus fractions & pedigrees, a thingmajig, a probe with an all-seeing eye, what do we need to measure kindness, every unheld breath, every unkind leapyear? Sometimes a sober voice is enough to calm the waters & drive away the false witnesses, saying, Look, here are the broken treaties Beauty brought to us earthbound sentinels.

The kindness of others is all they ever wanted, the laughter of neighbors prospering in the blue light of summer. Those of the small sputtering flame and the sudden white sprung hair, who feed off envy and grow old quickly, desire largesse. The role of poor relation evokes a lack they are not apt to admit, or unbearable pity. They prefer to penetrate the giver’s effortless knack of giving they perceive as vitality, a pulsating entity that rewards the kindness of others tenfold. This they have witnessed. This they have tabulated relentlessly. The generosity of others whose spirits, like their long-legged children blossoming into a progeny of orchards and fields, flourish. Those who have never known kindness drag into the privacy of their smallness the baskets of fruit appearing year after year on their porches, to be picked apart in the hushed posture of thieves. They peel skin, probe flesh the color of honey as if the seeds will yield something other than a glimmer of sweet air rising from the roots of trees and licorice-laced, half-opened leaves. Those of the small flame, who feed off envy and grow old quickly, live out their lives hungry, glaring at themselves across the table, wife of the cruel mouth, husband of the thin broth trickling like spittle.

"Kinetics Researcher from Vienna [Max Thun-Hohenstetin], 1930," by August Sander Nakedness ought to be undatable, Proof that the latest phenotype is made On the same plan as his original Who sauntered through the Garden, unafraid. Even without the cotton pouch he wears As a concession to the prudery Of viewers not evolved enough to share His unembarrassed objectivity, The willed detachment on his face would show, Better than any clothes, the difference Between the antique innocence that knows No shame, and cultivated shamelessness.