Forrest Gander

As grains sort inside a schist An ancient woodland indicator called dark dog’s mercury River like liquid shale And white-tipped black lizard-turds on the blue wall For a loss that every other loss fits inside Picking a mole until it bleeds As the day heaves forward on faked determinations If it’s not all juxtaposition, she asked, what is the binding agent? Creepy always to want to pin words on “the emotional experience” Azure hoplia cockchafer, the caddisworm, the bee-louse, blister beetle, assassin bug The recriminations swarm around sunset When it was otherwise quiet all the way around You who were given a life, what did you make of it?

Summer’s sweet theatrum! The boy lunges through The kitchen without comment, slams the door. An Elaborate evening drama. I lug his forlorn weight From floor to bed. Beatific lips and gap- Toothed. Who stayed late to mope and swim, then Breach chimneys of lake like a hooked gar Pressing his wet totality against me. Iridescent Laughter and depraved. Chromatic his constant state. At Ten, childhood took off like a scorched dog. Turned His head to see my hand wave from a window, and I too saw The hand untouching, distant from. What fathering- Fear slaked the impulse to embrace him? Duration! An indefinite continuation of life.I whirled out wings. Going Toward. And Lord Child claimed now, climbing loose.

Inside, inside the return, inside, the hero diminishes. Over her vessel they place a veil, and when it is lifted the name of the vessel has been lost. Consider the darkness of the water which has no scent and neither can it swallow. Yet the ship’s bow extends over the proscenium like a horse at a fence and the orchestra stands and files out. On the long walk home, I long to see your face.

—for Pilar Coover Me, when I think of you I see Alley cats in your kitchen, God weeping at your openings, Individual acts of imagination, never Culligan men under Floorboards slipping hallucinogens into your water. Let me say I have imagined you Undressing guests before mirrors To let their dragonfly bodies Escape from human shells.

Fog swaddles the trunks and so delineates, from a vast of green, the silhouette of each pine on the slope. Maybe it’s like that, only all along it was obscured by what — rush, distraction? Fog. A pine. Querying grosbeak. Something shifts. You find yourself in another world you weren’t looking for where what you see is that you have always been the wolves at the door. Left ajar, gaping, your own door. And you burst in as the Mangler, you gouge out your right eye which hath offended. And you burst in as the Great Liar gorging on your own flesh and as Won’t Let Go who shreds your tendons, gnaws your femur. You can’t stop bursting in, coming upon yourself alone, vulnerable, in the privacy of your dying, bending to pick up with a tissue a crushed spider from the bedroom floor, half-sensing in your solar plexus the forces of that which cannot yet be sussed, discovering yourself once again already to have been inside something like an equation with a remainder, a deodand, a reminder of the impossibility of reconcilement — to what? Once again. Forgive yourself, they say, but after you forgive what you have lived, what is left? You can’t set aside the jigger of  the present from the steady pour of hours or even differentiate trails of ants scurrying through some massive subterranean network from the shredded remains of a galaxy backlit by star glow. Time to close the door you think but your face is changed, so many crow’s feet. You must be on to the next stage in which you begin to recognize your mortal body, that nexus of your various holds on the world, as repository of every- thing you didn’t know you took in, human and not, all of it charged and reactant which accounts for the trembling in your hands as now you discern the body of your body — like a still, hanging bell that catches and concentrates each ghostly, ambient reverberation.

One of them             drops radio into hardhat and spits, Damn it, boys, we won’t need this one. But hell, they had already drilled the charge. In the dynamite’s wake, boulders turn to snow. Men walk through the trees. It’s cool now in here. Quiet enough to hear tracks rust; the Monte Ne line that never whistled through and the summering passengers unstartled by sudden dark, the temperature drop. Stones jut out, gargoyles scabbed with lichen. The steamy eye of an afternoon watches us from either end. We are waylaid by a spell. A stone slithers off or I imagine this. In the pitch I feel the others when they breathe. We are unborn. One of our silhouettes speaks, There’s a camera in the car. Bats opening like orchids. The absence of one of us, unimaginable— our present so intense its tense is aorist. Each of us afraid to leave two men he loves behind.

The clock here is quiet. Into the rain’s applause, a woman rises fatigued. Tablets dissolve in a glass by the bed. The wind lifts, branches animating inconsonant darkness. She undoes her gown, lays it over the bedpost. Seductive leg hair. Almost dawn, she makes coffee like that. Low thunder, glints of lightning, the dog’s concern.Rain on the roof, friends walking across my grave

Though each single life occurs in a series of occasions striking only by what blurry context precedes them So come to know what I should have wanted to say—from

This high up, the face eroding; the red cedar slopes over. An accident chooses a stranger. Each rain unplugs roots which thin out like a hand. Above the river, heat lightning flicks silently and the sound holds, coiled in air. Some nights you are here dangling a Valpolicella bottle, staring down at the flat water that slides by with its mouth full of starlight. It is always quiet when we finish the wine. While you were a living man how many pictures were done of you. Serious as an angel, lacing up your boots. Ice blows into my fields.

I’ll know the time to leave the room where I’ve been growing hair from my face, drinking dark beers when the light in the lake bums out. That’s when fish turn on their music. They lie in a blue current waiting for the moon to pass over, and the fishermen with their lanterns know this as they spill a can of sweet corn and wonder if they spoke what they were just thinking. I clear my way through the fog as music will break through static. The frogs strike up, a window goes out in the Home for Elders. Don’t you wonder why it is built far from anywhere, as though memory needs a terrain for forgetting; blind driveways to lost roads. As for my own parents, they did not grow old. What I know: dinners without conversation, stars that shine for anyone. I know my time is brief. I know love of the cut sleeve. I want to say don’t feel sorry for men, those who leave women smouldering like cigarettes, those who are fond of burials. War is a habit of mind, I swear by my mother’s gender. Tonight sticks in the leaves are slick as pilot snakes. Wherever I part branches no one is in a boat, no one has stirred a wake. Not jackknifing off the dock, it’s hauling myself back up that gooses my titties and makes my peter shrink. Don’t wake the cottonmouths. Summertime. If you were here and you remembered to stash your smokes in a Glad bag so they didn’t soak like mine we’d fall quiet now as pollen on water, I would tell you the true story of Urashima and the turtle.