An Instrument Also

The climate thinks with its knees. When the wound opens, music suspires. Opening a gate, I gain the color below the roof tiles and the tree limbs. You gave me the late quartets a black bird and a white and the Garden of Eden. Your death belongs to anyone but me. I wonder so as not to forget. At night in Brooklyn, the tendrils of a white sex denuded the sky, shimmering at the tall needle- ends of buildings. The traffic was identical in the spring. I am protected by only music I cannot remember. Why is it that the best minds ended by composing fairy tales? Death swarms. There are many new beings, the odor of hearts. The order of the hour of mating ends. These are many new butterflies, and death is no longer to be eyed by a young girl, perhaps twelve years old, slyly, as though the future were a man’s sleeve or stride. I wonder so as not to end dinner in a farmhouse. We sat at a low table. Our host was dying but unaware, as she would be murdered the next day in a distant city. There is an out- side of language that is not silence. There is an outside of God that is not isolation, a domestic animal teaching a dying woman to hunt. A wound opens. A gate opens. Tendrils climb.