Nate Klug

It hides its edges in speed, it has no edges. Plus every time he thinks he knows it close enough, can discriminate centripetal force from what gets sheared straight off, direction changes: through stunned space the blade snaps back, turtles into its handle and starts over spinning the other way. All along the chopped-up sidewalk (the need to keep breaking what we make to keep making) the concrete saw plunges and resurfaces, precise as a skull; it glints against the small smoke of its own work.

By new names and then no names at all, their laws will reach your land, Lorine, to feed on your much loved marshy spaces whose occasional faces discern a stranger from far off but like to take a break from well or welding just to talk. We can- not extricate a place from those it’s made of, the sounds it makes. But now from Blackhawk Island to Madison to Washington, geologies thin; more things sound or work the same. Their laws will reach your land, Lorine, by new names then no names at all.

Off rows of windshields in the Amtrak lot rain in sudden clumps like jacks. Parked cars with people in them awaiting people they imagine hurtling through suburbs of silver woods awaiting them. True love needs interference, a certain blizzard distance, for the words to worm through. Remember Iowa? August storms that would self-spark as if our fights could trip the finest wire beneath the sidewalk. And the sunlight, harder after.

Or how, when last sun,

Something blurred, warmed in the eye’s corner, like woodsmoke becoming tears; but when you turned to look the stoop was still, the pumpkin and tacky mum pot wouldn’t talk — just a rattle at the gutter and a sense of curtains, somewhere, pulled. Five of   them later, scarfing the oak’s black bole, laying a dream of snakes. Needy and reticent at once, these squirrels in charred November recall, in Virgil, what it is to feel: moods, half-moods, swarming, then darting loose; obscure hunches that refuse to speak, but still expect in some flash of   luck to be revealed. The less you try to notice them, the more they will know of  you.

As with this Jet Ski family braiding the lake with bigger and bigger shocks until the one car-sized one cuts his engine and, following him, for an instant they all coast through silences of self-made rain— how much is required now to carve, out of the general livable quiet, independence?

Not seeing me, not even looking, K. on her silver cruiser charms her way through the last long moment of   the changing light: snow boots and a Seychelles Warbler’s old blue tights, a rolled-up yoga mat in her basket wobbling like a wild tiller as she pedals. It feels illicit and somewhat right to stand across the intersection without shouting her name, or even waving. According to the internet tutorial, the fact that photons turn into tiny loyal billiard balls as soon as we start watching suggests no error of method or measurement, but rather, as far as anyone can tell, an invisibly unstable world, a shaking everywhere that seeing must pin down and fix. So, that morning I stumbled on you out, alone, bending through the traffic at Orange and Edwards Streets: a someone else then whom I, alone, can never otherwise see — there has to be a kind of   speech beyond naming, or even praise, a discipline that locates light and lets it go.

Where i -95 meets the Pike, a ponderous thunderhead flowered; stewed a minute, then flipped like a flash card, tattered edges crinkling in, linings so dark with excessive bright

Drepung, Tibet, 1958 So won a name in this place, handing off lath strips to a hammer's measure, seeing the passing girls' slits in roils of timber grain. Mountains, barley, scaffold, dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly from the hoods of faraway bells monks emerging like hairless animals. I was sixteen. What did I know of sovereignty, or the new soldiers by the gate, chinning their shotguns like violins? Nights, a tin roof wind cracked flat; my sister, flushed with child, hushing a child.

Not, this time, to infer but to wait you out between regret and parking lot somewhere in the day like a dare Salt grime and the foodcarts’ rising steam, at Prospect St. a goshawk huge and aloof, picking at something, nested in twigs and police tape for a while we all held our phones up It is relentless, the suddenness of every other song, creature, neighbor as though this life would prove you only by turning into itself