not knowing what to expect.
“Contrary to Keatsian joy,” he replied.
HEAT AND DESPERATION
Preparation, she thought,
as if a pianist,
limbering, stretching.
But fingers are tendon, not spirit;
are bone and muscle and skin.
Increase of reach extends reach,
but not what comes then to fill it.
What comes to fill it is something that has no name,
a hunger from outside the wolf-colored edges.
Thirteen smoke jumpers died at Mann Gulch.
Two ran faster.
One stopped, set a match ahead of himself,
ahead of the fire. Then stepped upslope,
lay down inside still-burning ashes, and lived.
LEFT-HANDED SUGAR
In nature, molecules are chiral—they turn in one direction or the other. Naturally then, someone wondered: might sugar, built to mirror itself, be sweet, but pass through the body unnoticed? A dieter’s gold mine. I don’t know why the experiment failed, or how. I think of the loneliness of that man-made substance, like a ghost in a ’50s movie you could pass your hand through, or some suitor always rejected despite the sparkle of his cubic zirconia ring. Yet this sugar is real, and somewhere exists. It looks for a left-handed tongue.
THE PROMISE
Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.
Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.
Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.
Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.
Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.
Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.
RED WINE IS FINED BY ADDING BROKEN EGGSHELLS
Red wine is fined by adding broken
eggshells or bull’s blood,
but does not taste of the animal traveled through it.
Cold leather of fog on the day, then only the day,
cleared and simple,
whose windows lift equally into what light happens.
The dog asks to go out and you let her,
age rough in her coat as stairs that keep no landing.
The familiar is not safety.
Yet a horse unblindered runs back to the shape it knows burning.
THE LOST LOVE POEMS OF SAPPHO
The poems we haven’t read
must be her fiercest:
imperfect, extreme.
As it is with love, its nights, its days.
It stands on the top of the mountain
and looks for more mountain, steeper pitches.
Descent a thought impossible to imagine.
BUILDING AND EARTHQUAKE
How easy it is for a dream to construct
both building and earthquake.
Also the nine flights of wooden stairs in the dark,
and the trembling horse, its hard breathing
loud in the sudden after-silence and starlight.
This time the dream allows the building to stand.
Something it takes the dreamer a long time to notice,
who thought that the fear was the meaning
when being able to feel the fear was the meaning.
EACH WE CALL FATE
What some could not have escaped
others will find by decision.
Each we call fate. Which Forgetfulness—
sister of Memory—will take back.
Not distinguishing necessity from choice,
not weighing courage against betrayal or luck.
“Did you then have your life?” the black crows will ask.
“Scent of strong tea,” you may answer.
“Color of swimming tuna, seen from below.
Grounds of the palace illimitable with mice and rabbits.”
THE VISIBLE HEAT
Near even a candle, the visible heat.
So it is with a person in love:
buying bread, paying a bridge toll.
You too have been that woman,
the one who is looked at and the one who looks.
Each lowers the eyes before it, without knowing why.
SOMETIMES THE HEART IS A SHALLOW AUTUMN RIVER
Is rock and shadow, bird.
Is fry, as the smallest fish are called,
darting in the pan of nearness.
The frog’s flawless interpretation of the music “Leaf”
is a floating black-eyed emerald
slipped between the water and its reflections.
And caution, and hope, and sorrow?
As umbrellas are, to a mountain or field of grass.
LOVE IN AUGUST
White moths
against the screen
in August darkness.
Some clamor
in envy.
Some spread large
as two hands
of a thief
who wants to put
back in your cupboard
the long-taken silver.
TWO RAINS
The dog came in
and shook off
water in every direction.
A chaotic rainstorm,
walking on four big paws.
The outside rain
fell straight,
in parallel lines
from a child’s drawing.
Windless, blunt, and cold,
that orderly rain,
like a fate
uninterrupted by late love.
WASHING DOORKNOBS
The glass doorknobs turn no differently.
But every December
I polish them with vinegar water and cotton.
Another year ends.
This one, I ate Kyoto pickles
and touched, in Xi’an, a stone turtle’s face,
cold as stone, as turtle.
I could not read the fortune carved into its shell
or hear what it had raised its head
to listen for, such a long time.
Around it, the madness of empires continued,
an unbitted horse that runs for a thousand miles
between grazing.
Around us, the madness of empires continues.
How happy we are,
how unhappy we are, doesn’t matter.
The stone turtle listens. The famished horse runs.
Washing doorknobs, one year enters another.
CHAPEL
The moonlight builds its cold chapel
again out of piecemeal darkness.
You who have ears and hands, it says, come in;
no need to stamp the snow-weight from your shoes.
It lifts another block and begins to chisel:
Kyoto, Vladivostok, Chicago, Beijing, Perth.
Huge-handed, working around you in silence,
as a cat will enter the silence where no dog lives.
TOLSTOY AND THE SPIDER
Moscow is burning.
Pierre sets out to kill Napoléon
and instead rescues a child.
Thus Tolstoy came today
to lift this spider in his large hand
and carry her free.
Now a cricket approaches the spider
set down inside her new story,
one hind leg missing.
The insects touch, a decision is made,
each moves away from the other
as if two exhausted and unprovisioned armies,
as if two planets passing out of conjunction,
or two royal cou
rts in procession,
neither willing to note the other’s passage.
Or like my own two legs:
their narrow lifetime of coming together and parting.
A story travels in one direction only,
no matter how often
it tries to turn north, south, east, west, back.
FOR THE LOBARIA, USNEA, WITCHES HAIR, MAP LICHEN, BEARD LICHEN, GROUND LICHEN, SHIELD LICHEN
Back then, what did I know?
The names of subway lines, busses.
How long it took to walk twenty blocks.
Uptown and downtown.
Not north, not south, not you.
When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,
you were gray-green, incomprehensible, old.
What you clung to, hung from: old.
Trees looking half-dead, stones.
Marriage of fungi and algae,
chemists of air,
changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.
Like those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving
unseen, unread, unremembered.
Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.
Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,
ash-of-the-woods.
Transformers unvalued, uncounted.
Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.
SWEATER
What is asked of one is not what is asked of another.
A sweater takes on the shape of its wearer,
a coffee cup sits to the left or the right of the workspace,
making its pale Saturn rings of now and before.
Lucky the one who rises to sit at a table,
day after day spilling coffee sweet with sugar, whitened with milk.
Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking, warmed by thick wool.
Lucky still, the one who writes later, shaking. Acrobatic at last, the sweater,
elastic as breath that enters what shape it is asked to.
Patient the table; unjudging, the ample, refillable cup.
Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given,
stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical pullings on.
SEAWATER STIFFENS CLOTH
Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’s dried.
As pain after it’s ended stays in the body:
A woman moves her hands oddly
because her grandfather passed through
a place he never spoke of. Making
instead the old jokes with angled fingers.
Call one thing another’s name long enough,
it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.
Call it a tree whose shape of branches happened.
Call what branching happened a man
whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.
Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,
to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.
Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence.
THE INVENTIVE, VISIBLE HOBBLES
The inventive, visible hobbles,
the cigarette, the battery,
the board.
What is done
is done through the body.
What can be stopped
is stopped with the body.
Yet an innocent elbow and fist,
ankle and foot,
touch the innocent shoulders and spine,
anus and breasts of others.
An innocent tongue,
licking innocent air as it speaks,
gives orders to hands
that could be slipping the skin from a peach.
Loud beyond hearing,
a hell where physical flames
might interrogate an apprehendable spirit,
its thighbone and cheekbone.
But no.
The crime goes free.
It dies with the dictator’s head on a downy pillow.
“Haofon Rece Swealg”
Batteries,
yellow trucks hauling garbage,
ampicillin, napalm.
These too will be
replaced by the not-yet-imagined.
The engines of diesel
will silence,
joining the engines of steam,
the brayings of mule.
And still the poetry of ancient Sumeria
will be understood with ease—
humiliation,
ambition,
slaughter,
the cutting down of the tallest cedar—
and Beowulf’s verdict yet hold:
Technologies alter.
Heaven swallows the smoke.
SHADOW: AN ASSAY
Mostly we do not think of, even see you,
shadow,
for your powers at first seem few.
Why command “Heel,” ask “Sit,”
when before the thought is conceived,
you are already there?
True that sometimes you run ahead, sometimes behind,
that early and late,
to you, must be words of the deepest poignance:
while inside them, you are larger than you were.
Midday drives you to reticence, sulking,
a silence
I’ve felt many times inside me as well.
You came with me to Kraków, Glasgow, Corfu.
Did you enjoy them?
I never asked.
Though however close my hand came to the table,
you were closer, touching before my tongue
the herring and cheeses, the turpentine-scented retsina.
Many times I have seen you sacrifice yourself
without hesitation,
disentangling yourself like Anna Karenina from her purse
before passing under the train wheels of her own thoughts.
Like art, though, you are resilient: you rose again.
Are you then afterlife, clutterless premonition?
You shake your head as soon as I do—
no, we think not.
Whatever earth I will vanish silently into, you also will join.
You carry, I have read,
my rages, fears, and self-regard.
You carry, I have read, my unrevealed longings,
and the monster dreamed as a child, tongueless and armless.
Your ordinary loneliness I recognize too as my own.
When you do not exist,
I have gone with you into darkness,
as the self of a former life
goes into the self that was tortured and beaten
and does not emerge again as it was,
though given a clean shirt to leave in, given pants and new shoes.
For this too is shadow, and mine,
however unspoken:
though you are tongueless, and armless, you harm.
Your inaction my own deepest failure, close by my side.
You who take nothing, give nothing, instruct me,
that my fate may weigh more than yours—
The hour is furious, late.
Your reach, horizontal, distant, leans almost forgiving,
almost indistinguishable from what it crosses.
THE QUESTION
I tried to ask my dead—
they answered as always.
I tried to ask the black resourceful ants.
The redwoods swayed
in the honeys of branch-light.
The moored boats shuffled their hulls.
Across the water, the city’s windows glittered,
a fastness.
The gelding’s breath passed over and out of my hand.
And so I came to turn again to you,
my min
eral sadness.
To look you eye to open eye. To wait.
ALL DAY THE DIFFICULT WAITING
All day the difficult waiting.
“Continuance” repeating itself inside the ears,
as if a verb, or choice.
As if Levin during his long spring in Anna Karenina—
reading and suffering
because he could not understand what he read or suffered.
Planting and mowing what was outside him.
The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not.
WILD PLUM
A gray squirrel tests each plum with his nose,
moving from one to another
until he feasts.
It is like watching the ego,
moving from story to story.
A man is proud of his strong brown teeth,
though all his children have died.
This tree the one he was given,
its small, sustaining fruit, some green, some yellow.
Pits drop to the ground,
a little moistness clings in the scorings.
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