Whatever the cost I pay up at the minnow pools.
I don’t know anything of the misery of these trapped fish,
or the failure of the marsh I’m so hidden.

Up above is the island with its few houses facing
the ocean God walks with anyone there. I often
slosh through the low tide to a sister
unattached to causeways.

It’s where deer mate then lead their young
by my house to fields, again up above me.

Pray for me. Like myself be lost.
An amulet under your chest, a green sign of the first
rose you ever saw, the first shore.

She came like music: when she went
A silence fell upon the man.
Death took the sun away with her—
Ann Rutledge—deathless Ann.

She left upon his life a light,
A music sounding through his years,
A spirit singing through his toils,
A memory in his tears.

She was the dream within his dream;
And when she turned and went away
She took the romance from the night
The rapture from the day.

But from her beauty and her doom,
A man rose merciful and just;
And a great People still can feel

They are indigenous in me, says Old green America.
The law says go west, and pick a plot of land, and build
an 8×10 house under shade of my law, and live there,
and the title of the land will stream into your fingers.
The country is still so new, the states must draw themselves
every morning, all real and future and possible states
draw themselves over the land. “This country is infested
with states,” say the settlers, “they crawl on their bellies
through the mud, have learned to look like their surroundings,

For Peter S.
I saw the shrouds of prisoners
like baptismal gowns
buried outside the cemetery.

On the canvas frills exhaled
singed wool and cardboard.

The angels arrived as lace.
Took notes, then stuck. Awful residue
from a small cut.

•

The veil has been ripped from the skin
where it was burned in.

The skin is the veil, the baby-material,
imprinted on, as if
one dropped the handkerchief
and it was one’s wrist.

The cuff is frightening.
Stuffed onto oil.

That marsh hawk,
its blown-leaf flight
across Tomales Bay fog,
summer’s abraded light,
the Pacific tide pressuring
and squeezing wave on wave
into the bay’s pinched inlet…
We feel somehow between us
still water crushed by that sea,
so constant it seems not to be.
The hawk, a circus, tumbles,
stops, stands upon the air,
beats its wings as if to shoo
the sun’s drenched veils,
and its clapping wings stop
our unstoppable argument,
that love goes, who knows why,
and delivers us from pain
to pain, air with teeth

I find it in a field of feathers, pink-crested,
a knuckle of bone picked clean by the wind,
a pale mohawk mounted on stone.

I bend down. Zeroed out of its head
are two sockets, two airy planets
full with sun, and taking asylum in one

a millipede is coiled, a slick black hypnotist.
Polished, it spirals in on itself
like one of Saint Hilda’s fossil snakes

we studied in the school chapel’s stained glass.
As if the eye could dig itself into the earth
then extend a curled feeler out, like a fern.

snowbound
homebound
hidebound
hamstrung
hogtied
in a corner
up a tree
down the river
nosedive
headway
deadmarch
footloose
pointblank
playground

We had gathered under a tent in the park
for some words before lunch and after separate mornings,
and when—twice—the poet said “capital,”
the lightning bolts that followed the noun
had me bolting too; I’d always suspected
God’s communist leanings, but now I regretted
how few exchanges we know
between craft and climate:

imagine a rhyme inciting a rainbow,
blood feuds bruising the sky,
hymns of forgiveness bringing a soft
new light to the faces watching the last act,
waltzes and songs and declamations—

A red wing rose in the darkness.
—“Encounter”

After the red bird rises through the night,
it leaves a wing-shaped shadow on the sky.

The teacher asks, If the field is dark
how can the poet see red flight? and would like

one of the boys (his baseball cap pulled low
over his eyes) to answer that we know

the color of our blood from memory.
We don’t need light. A girl would reply

the bird predicts both darting hare and man
whose gesture follows, a lightning run

I butterflied Australian rack of lamb
with shallots, garlic, parsley, butter, wine
(some in the pan, some for the palate).
Although the livestock loved in nursery rhyme
avoided clumps of mint, it served my family
nonetheless. I am no PETA zealot
(leather jacket, handbag, wallet, shoes)
but wonder if the deeds we do pursue
us in the afterlife. Does the fleecy
creature have a tenderable claim?
My lambent mind considers our short lease
on life, the oven hot. Am I to blame?
Who gave thee such a tender voice? asked Blake.