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Late, late, so late! and dark the night and chill! Late, late, so late! but we can enter still. Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. No light had we: for that we do repent; And learning this, the bridegroom will relent. Too late, too late! ye cannot enter now. No light: so late! and dark and chill the night! O, let us in, that we may find the light! Too late, too late: ye cannot enter now. Have we not heard the bridegroom is so sweet? O, let us in, tho' late, to kiss his feet! No, no, too late! ye cannot enter now."

All our life so much laundry; each day’s doing or not comes clean, flows off and away to blend with other sins of this world. Each day begins in new skin, blessed by the elements charged to take us out again to do or undo what’s been assigned. From socks to shirts the selves we shed lift off the line as if they own a life apart from the one we offer. There is joy in clean laundry. All is forgiven in water, sun and air. We offer our day’s deeds to the blue-eyed sky, with soap and prayer, our arms up, then lowered in supplication.

When we finally flip it over the fireflies are out. The neighbor boy has had his stitches in so I can finally admit I think it is all fantastic: the suck of the spark plug undone, the stuck blade bent into the guard, and the sound of the hammer’s head reshaping the metal. In this our suburban Eden we’ve only a teenage Adam too dreamy to manage his motorized scythe and silly Eve leaving her coffee cups and plastic plant pots behind in the grass. Though it’s a long way from a fall, this spring’s first disaster, I did like the thin thread of red on his upper lip, and I like my mower turned over among the glowworms, a monstrous dandelion as unnatural as we are, out in a garden, with our untidy golds and our dangerous sharps.

She sits there on that high hill    just sits there and lets things pass through her until one snags and she fits it into the pattern of this fine mesh of    what    spirit?    But, ah, there’s a cowboy hat and a cherry bomb tattoo and it snags    and what she lets through may, 
I say,may be caught second time around like that oil pan off an old Hudson or that artificial leg    toward morning she’s collected some radio signals from a dead ship    and a janitor’s song and some folderol from a church picnic with iced tea fried chicken collards and a whole lot of stentorian god-speak with apple pie and ice cream.    I’ll be damned if all those things aren’t moving around in one another’s magnetic fields, some kind of counterpoint that happens each time she breathes    it’s a mobile only no wires    there’s a piece of mirror turning on a spider web and now she’s a    signal beacon    says come on up I’ve got something to read and somehow it all works. Then she pulls this silk thread and it becomes a form.

Furthermore, Mr. Tuttle used to have to run in the streets. Now, each time friendship happens, they’re fully booked. Sporting with amaryllis in the shade is all fine and good, but when your sparring partner gets there first you wonder if it was all worth it. “Yes, why do it?” I’m on hold. It will take quite a lot for this music to grow on me. I meant no harm. I’ve helped him from getting stuck before. Dumb thing. All my appetites are friendly. Children too are free to go and come as they please. I ask you only to choose between us, then shut down this election. But don’t reveal too much of your hand at any given time. Then up and pipes the major, leave the hand in, or change the vows. The bold, enduring menace of courtship is upon us like the plague, and none of us can say what trouble will be precipitated once it has had its way with us. Our home is marshland. After dinner was wraparound. You got a tender little look at it. Outside, it never did turn golden.

Where the slow river meets the tide, a red swan lifts red wings and darker beak, and underneath the purple down of his soft breast uncurls his coral feet. Through the deep purple of the dying heat of sun and mist, the level ray of sun-beam has caressed the lily with dark breast, and flecked with richer gold its golden crest. Where the slow lifting of the tide, floats into the river and slowly drifts among the reeds, and lifts the yellow flags, he floats where tide and river meet. Ah kingly kiss— no more regret nor old deep memories to mar the bliss; where the low sedge is thick, the gold day-lily outspreads and rests beneath soft fluttering of red swan wings and the warm quivering of the red swan's breast.

Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy In    ...    the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net, in time of the breaking of nations, and in elementary arithmetic, the lichen-gray primaries keep in sufficiently close touch as to impose one part of a pattern onto another. The vibrational halo of the string figures passing from flower to flower, border to border — night-moths of measureless size, circling among the young, among the weak and old, hawk-moths at dusk hatching the war-adept in the mornings — the vibrational halo near the great wings is not the judgment-hour, only thin smoke without flame written on terrestrial things. I confess I do not believe in time. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness is an imitation game    ...    filled with the mysteries of mimicry    ...    But when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp and a deadly cipher flaps its glad green leaves like wings, what is our solution? Peace on earth and silence in the sky? I think that is not the faith and fire within us    ...    Still, I look into the depth of each breeding-cage, each floating-point form cleft into light and shade, hoping it might be so.

The shadows of birds fading on a fighter’s back The undressing of words on an unstamped postcard The wet swings in the distant park The jealousy of raindrops on the umbrella of lovers The laughter of a boy before a bird The song of two flutes, two swords, two bracelets, two fingers The stare of a wave before a pearl The yearning between the legs of a farmer’s wife The opening of doors             closing midday The sudden howling of our muse—and les éventails—disturbing the guest inside of us

In the end, some are incurable. They use lint to mop up the leaking, or apply cold poultices. Creeping mess can be cleared up with pink paste or trapped in sawdust and swept. Blood can pool from their sitting and standing, but they avoid clots by regular shaking, and the sucking of sherbet. Blue blue for the sky, white for the walls, apricot for glass and woodwork. They devise a timetable by casting lots. They scrabble around in the dirt for clues. Seven is too magical a number to hold, but the soft ones like to handle it constantly. They polish its fine teak head, drive theories through its shaft and talk into the early hours about how it can resemble an ax, or sex, and how it solves, as well as creates, all conundr/ums/a. They admire their creosoted fence for protection and their own faces in its misaligned hasp. A Mrs. Milkwater puts baby brushes to soak in milk and water (and vinegar). Her sons are successful barbers. At precisely midnight the blue lights go out. The red lights stay home.

Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down. Let the cricket take up chafing as a woman takes up her needles and her yarn. Let evening come. Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned in long grass. Let the stars appear and the moon disclose her silver horn. Let the fox go back to its sandy den. Let the wind die down. Let the shed go black inside. Let evening come. To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop in the oats, to air in the lung let evening come. Let it come, as it will, and don’t be afraid. God does not leave us comfortless, so let evening come.