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Stand still, and I will read to thee A lecture, love, in love's philosophy. These three hours that we have spent, Walking here, two shadows went Along with us, which we ourselves produc'd. But, now the sun is just above our head, We do those shadows tread, And to brave clearness all things are reduc'd. So whilst our infant loves did grow, Disguises did, and shadows, flow From us, and our cares; but now 'tis not so. That love has not attain'd the high'st degree, Which is still diligent lest others see. Except our loves at this noon stay, We shall new shadows make the other way. As the first were made to blind Others, these which come behind Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes. If our loves faint, and westwardly decline, To me thou, falsely, thine, And I to thee mine actions shall disguise. The morning shadows wear away, But these grow longer all the day; But oh, love's day is short, if love decay. Love is a growing, or full constant light, And his first minute, after noon, is night.

I. PLACE. —A small alcove with dark curtains. The class consists of one member. SUBJECT.—Thomson’s Mirror Galvanometer.

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains mottled as if with oil stains. Configurations of cloud-shadows. Easy gait of hours: a way through — or into — the dry winds. Our church is the mountains, says the guide to the tour group, all of whom have been instructed to keep their cameras inside their bags. 
A group crowding the aisles of San Geronimo Chapel. On the dirt path between adobe structures, bareheaded. Stretching, palms out, as steam from the boiling pot does. To move along the earth without keeping a ledger. The horsefly not so incongruous with the sagebrush. Still, reflexive swatting. We’re good citizens, we serve in the Army, though we’re regarded as second 
class by the US government. Framed badges and news stories in the house of the retired sheriff. Men in his family who have been policemen, firemen, soldiers. His wife pinching the ears of bear sculptures formed from mica clay. Thick paste of red soil and the piñon that pierces through it. To carry on from day to day without exercising the sloppy hand of 
manipulation. Four dollars for a plate of fry bread in cinnamon butter. The boy at the counter restless, wanting to get back to the electronic dance 
music on pause on his iPhone. Reading a history backward, the deep strata. Settling on this life as a parasite on its host. That man next door who you bought from? He sells jewelry made by an Anglo woman. His wife. The stray dog asleep on her side, dreams ripped from her open jaw. Money touched from hand to hand. Whole lifetimes spent trying to make sense of an appetite. A town called Tres Orejas.Three ears. Plenty.

A morning's silver announces sky Speech bent the tree into a new posture My smile is becoming different from you. —becoming—and you crave an earlier affection Where was the silver becoming from? Who forgets that we dream—who forgets we dream The dark is near! That loss was dark; there that's darker! A page, we become *         *       * You read the page —you read this page Once upon a once there was a once and that once evaporated into air it was said it once was all over the sky then once came back and died You understood what I saw You understood everything —close the door now It knows where to be Here, can you explain? A light bulb replaced the silver *         *       * The page is silvery—almost as silver —announced a child— When it went to the town —it had changed When it became the town —it changed its shape Afterword said it didn't have its own way It didn't have a once in its life— a once and for all It took a wife . . . The end, the ending *         *       * Children ran from the tree Silver poured from the sky —in the garden birds bathed— bathing in the garden birds sang It was dizzy in the air and rosy on the wind Once once came along and spoke to the bride It thought the wood enchanted Afterword said it was empty Afterword came too and spoke to the groom It thought the world was wide Afterword said it was narrow *         *       * Syntax bent the child —playing on the page Speech—be quiet! To see you reflected in the smudged window now. Night reminds one of fingerprints— unlike a face —in its orbit Tips of hair sweep by like fronds —"just like fronds!"—you exclaim —show me the fronds if you please *         *       * Becoming a tree —the children . . . Becoming a page —the birds in unison From here to the nervous system—A body sang Suspended above the page Above the total mass of trees Willows bend to console the child From here to . . . —a lovely thing— Becoming a tree *         *       * Let us return to speech— Silver morning—bent to break —syntax Up there on a stage Children carry silver leaves —carry birds on their heads You fasten me with your songs The Fables say— where a page is a page and a tree tree I used to be a book Now I am a book All the endings say All the dreams say All the children say *         *       * Once upon a once there was a once and that once evaporated into air it was said it once was all over the sky then once came back and died It was said— my smile is becoming a page —becoming an adventure It sang— my smile is what the children say

for Richard Hugo The Rev. Royal Filkin preaches tomorrow on why we are sad. Brethren, Montana’s a landscape requiring faith: the visible government arrives in trucks, if you live out far enough. If you live in town, the government’s gone, on errands, in trucks. Let citizens go to meetings, I’ll stay home. I hate a parade. By the time you get the trout up through the tiny triangular holes in the Coors cans, they’re so small you have to throw them back. Glum miles we go to Grandmother’s house. The earth out here doesn’t bear us up so much as it keeps us out, an old trick of the beautiful. Remember what Chief Left Hand said? Never mind. Everything else was taken from him, let’s leave his grief alone. My Eastern friends ask me how I like it in the West, or God’s country, as it’s sometimes called, though God, like a slumlord, lives in the suburbs: Heaven. And I don’t live “in the West”; I live in this canyon among a few other houses and abandoned mines, vaccinations that didn’t take.

I Left the house shattered, it hurt so bad, so many years as a man, compromise, in spite of partial success in intellectual tussle he was never anyone of Olympian allure. He walked slowly through the dreamscape of the late autumn day, barely distinguishable from early spring, with young willows and a patch of waste ground where blue jays screamed. Dreamy exposure to phenomena that to nature in its administration of various cycles—young and old alike— are inseparably part of a single order—: so he drank his gin and accepted a dish of sausage soup, free on Thursdays with a beverage and so found the Olympian balance of sorrow and pleasure. II

When the Amish girl gets off the bus she walks over and stomps her small black boot into a drift in front of McDonald's. She is maybe new to winter this far north and wants to know its depth. Its give. Oh, be careful. It already has you by the night of your dress, violet-black with white-dotted print.

her grandmother called her from the playground “yes, ma’am” “i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old woman proudly but the little girl didn’t want to learn how because she knew even if she couldn’t say it that that would mean when the old one died she would be less dependent on her spirit so she said “i don’t want to know how to make no rolls” with her lips poked out and the old woman wiped her hands on her apron saying “lord these children” and neither of them ever said what they meant and i guess nobody ever does

(For Blues People) In the south, sleeping against the drugstore, growling under the trucks and stoves, stumbling through and over the cluttered eyes of early mysterious night. Frowning drunk waving moving a hand or lash. Dancing kneeling reaching out, letting a hand rest in shadows. Squatting to drink or pee. Stretching to climb pulling themselves onto horses near where there was sea (the old songs lead you to believe). Riding out from this town, to another, where it is also black. Down a road where people are asleep. Towards the moon or the shadows of houses. Towards the songs’ pretended sea.

In Chicago, it is snowing softly and a man has just done his wash for the week. He steps into the twilight of early evening, carrying a wrinkled shopping bag full of neatly folded clothes, and, for a moment, enjoys the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper, flannellike against his gloveless hands. There’s a Rembrandt glow on his face, a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek as a last flash of sunset blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street. He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese, and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw, dingy and too large. He negotiates the slick of ice on the sidewalk by his car, opens the Fairlane’s back door, leans to place the laundry in, and turns, for an instant, toward the flurry of footsteps and cries of pedestrians as a boy—that’s all he was— backs from the corner package store shooting a pistol, firing it, once, at the dumbfounded man who falls forward, grabbing at his chest. A few sounds escape from his mouth, a babbling no one understands as people surround him bewildered at his speech. The noises he makes are nothing to them. The boy has gone, lost in the light array of foot traffic dappling the snow with fresh prints. Tonight, I read about Descartes’ grand courage to doubt everything except his own miraculous existence and I feel so distinct from the wounded man lying on the concrete I am ashamed. Let the night sky cover him as he dies. Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven and take up his cold hands. IN MEMORY OF JAY KASHIWAMURA