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The irresistible and benevolent light brushes through the angel-wing begonias, the clippings of ruddy ears for the living room. Intimate motes, debris of grounded, forlorn walks, speckle through the vitreous quality of blush. As fluid lulls turn like trout backs, azure-tipped fins oscillate in the shallows, the clear floating is dizziness. Tender events are meeting halves and wholes of affinity, the recurrence of whimsy and parallel streams flush away the blockage of malaise. Incessant gratitude, pliable kindness smolders in the husk of these sweet accumulations: abalone shells, the thoughtful carvings from friends, the stone of another’s pocket, the photo of mystified moon over water, the smiles of worn chairs. Austere hopes find pleasure in lately cherished flowers. The blooms are articulate deluge, hues of delicacy. Petals parted dim renderings, the viable imprint of the blood-hot beam of light with reformed courage. Beveling the finish to suppression, the blade of choice brings the flourish of dividing while adequately doubling worth by two. Multiplying. The luminescent burning of space. The heat is a domicile as abandoned as red roses budding their ascension from stem. The sun has its own drum contenting itself with the rose heart it takes into continual rumbling. The connection of surface and hand. The great head of dark clouds finds its own place of unraveled repercussions and disruption, elsewhere, over the tall, staunch mountains of indemnity.

Outside outside myself there is a world, he rumbled, subject to my incursions —William Carlos Williams, Paterson i. impossible. sterile extrusion the rigour of its beauty its crumpled geometry worked to defeat. light, stopped. locked in its form shuttered and windless in dry rifts, split, furrowed, mottled, creased. ii. trundling bulging from behind, its too heavy body its natural carapace shelving green, sinking the sea beneath it the difficulty piling up, rising to the surface. iii. swirling backward on blue flowering currents rolling up sudden, in spray and mist —like the turning of a page that leaves us blinded for a second— unlocked in a milky scum half hid, long on its axis growing open wounds of violet, emerald, silver. a point of astonishment. lapses of silence. air.

for Dennis Wheeler there are shining masters when I tell you what they look like    some of it is nearly false   their blue hair but they are not ourselves   they are equivalents   of action    they compose forms,    which we hear sound within a context as if that action we are images of    used us the body becomes an instrument sometimes the harp pierces the body and a man only hangs on the strings I hear the airborne-fire, the dead rebels’ second speech, which follows their live words, and the rice, and the motorcycles but public life has fallen asleep like a secret name    the wrong-reader will say he has pity for others where the thought is born in hatred of pity

1 Likely as not a ruined head gasket Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver: A machine involved with itself, a concentrated Hot lump of a machine Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the valves jumping And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing stops, Is stopped, with the last slow cough In the manifold, the flywheel blundering Against compression, stopping, finally Stopped, compression leaking From the idle cylinders will one imagine Then because he can imagine That squeezed from the cooling steel There hovers in that moment, wraith-like and like a plume of steam, an aftermath, A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of comprehension. 2 Endlessly, endlessly, The definition of mortality The image of the engine That stops. We cannot live on that. I know that no one would live out Thirty years, fifty years if the world were ending With his life. The machine stares out, Stares out With all its eyes Thru the glass With the ripple in it, past the sill Which is dusty—If there is someone In the garden! Outside, and so beautiful. 3 What ends Is that. Even companionship Ending. ‘I want to ask if you remember When we were happy! As tho all travels Ended untold, all embarkations Foundered. 4 On that water Grey with morning The gull will fold its wings And sit. And with its two eyes There as much as anything Can watch a ship and all its hallways And all companions sink. 5 Also he has set the world In their hearts.

Image tensed, I eye the instant, Anticipation welling— And I expect no one; In the lit shadows I watch as the doorbell Sheds its inaudible Pollen of sound— And I expect no one; Within four walls Astounded more by space Than any desert place, I expect no one; But come he will, He must, if I hold on To bloom unseen; He’ll suddenly appear When I am least aware: Coming as if to forgive All he gives to death, Coming to assure me Of his reward and mine, Coming as anodyne For my pain, for his— Perhaps his whisper is Already on its way.

Imaginary book on Imaginary paper in Imaginary hands Imaginary dance on Imaginary floor in Imaginary lands Imaginary phone and Imaginary car Imaginary raising of Imaginary bar Imaginary kid Imaginary tree Imaginary you makes Imaginary three Imaginary soul Imaginary death Imaginary line Imaginary breath Imaginary neighbors with Imaginary friends Imaginary road with Imaginary bends Imaginary pot Imaginary beer Imaginary death Imaginary fear Imaginary love that stops you dead Imaginary bullet of Imaginary lead Imaginary day and Imaginary night Imaginary wind Imaginary kite Imaginary heat and Imaginary ice Imaginary toppings on Imaginary slice Imaginary Emerson meet Imaginary Poe Imaginary poet Imaginary crow 1-9-16

In the real world lovers part at morning with a kiss and look back longingly before they pass from sight. They go insouciant to work and smile at times; their life’s Vivaldi. Others bring what poetry they can into a life by counting days until employment comes again. They look at cherries in the fruit store and imagine biting in. They look so good. Children break from singing in the drill hall, burst outside to toss their frisbees in the park. A boy plays Satie on the piano; two Americans embrace as traffic whispers up the drive. They are embarking for the real world’s farthest shore. In the real world someone signs petitions every moment, tidies other people’s trash and greets another who is loved by someone else. This is how the real world copes with being economics, mathematics and ecology and botany and waiting for the bus. Costumed people earn their living slipping from the real world to persuade us to buy moon-cakes, supple skin and perfect hair. We smile to see them aping us. Gymnorhina tibicen swoops low and boasts her turf: the children run and shout out, ‘Magpie’ while the bird recalls the day in mimic song; order then restored, she dines alfresco on their scraps. And while we watch Magritte’s sky turn El Greco, roofs de Chirico beneath the plastic clouds, a plane is pasted on a sudden patch of blue.

The mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed is not big and is not small. Big and small are comparative categories, and to what could the mountain that remains when the universe is destroyed be compared? Consciousness observes and is appeased. The soul scrambles across the screes. The soul, like the square root of minus 1 , is an impossibility that has its uses.

The healer said to me:it worked because you thought it would. I let him palm my belly and chest; sometimes he shook and closed his eyes. Inches above my skin, he'd sweep his hands like smoothing sheets I couldn't see. I left our bed for years when I was sick. I understood our children then: bed meant missing out; bed felt like punishment. Now I sleep best at the edge—where the healer sat to rest. Your hand reches for my hip, holds on. Our children's mouths sigh open in the dark. They're not surprised: the healer touched me, and it worked. They've seen magicians — beneath the sheet that's pulled away, something's always gone.

Without intending to hide, the imagined copperhead hid on the path ahead, unseen on bronze leaves, unheard, and a mortal likelihood at every step. This was childhood, mine, the wood’s jihad against a boy who’d intruded among monkshood, wasp, tick, and nettles haired with needles. Scrub brush abhorred him with a horde of  welts, bites, and stings, but he’d never seen a copperhead, though he’d looked hard taking, as he’d been ordered, heed. The snake wasn’t a falsehood, though, to him. Dread was his nature, and he hared through sunlight and shade, head swiveling for the copperhead he’d begun to covet, the ballyhooed killer a camouflaged godhead on which his inborn faith cohered, and his priesthood.