Allan Peterson

The laughing gull that flew behind the fencepost and never came out was the beginning and then a hand smaller than my hand covered Wisconsin with a gesture for explanation. In the afternoon there are pauses between the words through which commas can grow like daisy fleabane. A fish with an osprey in its back emerges from the Sound and nothing can be learned by more analysis. The book of her hair opens to its binding and I leaf through the glorious pages of appreciation and that’s not all. We could not have turned fast enough to catch light and leftovers from so much of what happened: the swift figures behind you like a planet’s dark companion, ships entering and leaving the hall closet the real and imagined between which is no difference.

The Emperor thought of his heart as a water wheel flooding the rice fields of all creation and bloodied the water for a better harvest. His warriors hoped for a life with wings. His swallowtails wrote him the same lines —the secret of life is a resurrected worm— He told them eventually time would run backwards in their hands, now empty where a crossbow went. A theory works if it answers the exceptions. The writing in the air of swallowtails, from here to where the time changes at Mexico Beach, is like writing all the armies of the afterlife waiting underground in China. We are attuned to shadows. They strafe the shore. An osprey spins above the trees. But when a large one stops suddenly above the house, all the laws have been broken. A theory that a moment is a warehouse where armies are stacked to the ceiling, then one falls, is the last exception. The osprey’s underside is streaked like a zebra swallowtail. It misses the fish that dove out of the reach of shadows as the lovers jumped into theirs from the Bay Bridge to Fort Walton. If any should meet hovering over a milkweed or reflection, they might say didn’t I know you in another life, the kind of thing said often in Fort Walton or the Orient and didn’t plum blossoms freeze in the Emperor’s courtyard.

I was so worried the hickory I recognized had died from salt burn in the last hurricane I may have passed by vervain and apple haw like they didn’t matter, but this spring it put out seven shoots from its base. Still, the oldest trick is the moon missing, then the “new” moon appears, though we know it’s the old one, and we pretend to be taken in like the mother or baby behind the bath towel. Really it’s the moon winking, being the stone that holds stones and now footprints. And when I tell Frances, I see she is a moon motionless in the doorway, skin reflecting a lamp, a face that awakens on paper.

To have that letter arrive was like the mist that took a meadow and revealed hundreds of small webs once invisible The inevitable often stands by plainly but unnoticed till it hands you a letter that says death and you notice the weed field had been readying its many damp handkerchiefs all along

October five. Seven years older in dog years and then your November the day record snowfalls hit Randolph New Hampshire in forty-three and I am thinking of something intimate and impossible to waste: Brazil’s undiscovered caverns of amethyst     endless smooth oval stones along Washington’s moody Pacific chewing a continent. But I am wrong. We pass St. Michael’s the cemetery that asks the public to mow and weed it and perhaps draw larger conclusions about the already wasted and tidy up names frayed at the edges by the ions that bind     by age the chemical salt of time that jostles stones over at their bases to remind us or alter their sentiments. We read and read and each time nothing new has come up on their markers. At home we hear the fishermen bring up their nets smack water to scare them. By now the flounder’s secret pocket where its heart and everything separate from meat and bone is cleaned and empty as a silk purse not a nickel left down in the freezer. Nothing really shines but this: I have loved you eight presidents. Forty years. Five point seven in dog.

The intriguing comfort of an imagined past is entered through objects the same way we continue the present but without nostalgia Parents so long for happiness they say one life is not enough and live through their children But children also live backwards through past candles crank telephones   carriages the ascendant animals that lived not in imagination but in Kansas and before there was an Oklahoma with its spotted sun In those days a metaphor for Hell was the corn sheller field corn shriven  shooting out cobs the grindstone   razor strop   even the ladder of progress from which Les Westfield slipped on a mossy rung though his son held the ladder and fell two stories: one the feudal structure of the family   two the harmonic of almost fatal necessity as the maple stump entered his hip along with the difficult remission of breath itself an antique whose furious elaborations mimicked the rose