English

For one thing, there"s no more snow
to watch from an evening window,
and no armfuls of logs to carry into the house
so cumbersome you have to touch the latch with an elbow,

and once inside, no iron stove waiting like an old woman
for her early dinner of wood.

No hexagrams of frost to study carefully
on the cold glass pages of the bathroom.

And there"s no black sweater to pull over my head
while I wait for the coffee to brew.

Instead, I walk around in children"s clothes —

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,
in me are lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,
nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.
Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me
whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets — the narrow ones,
unlabeled on the self-map —
they follow stairs down music ears can"t follow,

and in my tongue borrowed by darkness,
in hours uncounted by the self-clock,

There isn"t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

— so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it"s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity

The day turned into the city
and the city turned into the mind
and the moving trucks trumbled along
like loud worries speaking over
the bicycle"s idea
which wove between
the more armored vehicles of expression
and over planks left by the construction workers
on a holiday morning when no work was being done
because no matter the day, we tend towards
remaking parts of it — what we said
or did, or how we looked —
and the buildings were like faces
lining the banks of a parade

Because you used to leaf through the dictionary,
Casually, as someone might in a barber shop, and
Devotedly, as someone might in a sanctuary,
Each letter would still have your attention if not
For the responsibilities life has tightly fit, like
Gears around the cog of you, like so many petals
Hinged on a daisy. That"s why I"ll just use your
Initial. Do you know that in one treasured story, a
Jewish ancestor, horseback in the woods at Yom
Kippur, and stranded without a prayer book,
Looked into the darkness and realized he had

I had just hung up from talking to you
and we had been so immersed in the difficulty
you were facing, and forgive me,
I was thinking that as long as we kept talking,
you in your car in the parking lot of the boys" school
as the afternoon deepened into early evening,
and me in the study, all the books around
that had been sources of beauty to us,
as long as we stayed in the conversation
padded with history like the floor of the pine forest,
as long as I thought out loud, made a joke

Ticker shift: clockworkaholic heart
expels what blood it admitted & roundabout
the blood slushes sufficient to oxygenate
my morning dream, ratcheting up
its plot"s incidents twice, thrice
too ingenious now to go on: alarm.

Ticker shift: clockworkaholic heart
expels what blood it admitted & roundabout
the blood slushes sufficient to oxygenate
my morning dream, ratcheting up
its plot"s incidents twice, thrice
too ingenious now to go on: alarm.

I will up & scurry my citizenship out of house &

Ah, the things
they call to mind!
Cherry blossoms.

We gaze into your eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes.
We forget the display is blind.

Your fanned tail really a cupped palm,
gathering each hen"s quiver to your ear,

your feathers the green-blue glamours of
reflective absence. No one

ever praises the ass of the peacock,
grin of quills that does the heavy lifting,

or how you eat anything from ants
to Styrofoam, from cheese to chicken.

Road roamer, flower devourer:
the one who"ll pick a fight with a goat.

Preen all you want. What I love of you

The silence of the night
on the staff
of the infinite.

I go out into the street naked
ripe with poems
lost.
The black, riddled
by cricket song,
has this will-o'-the-wisp
dead
from the sound.
That musical light
that is perceived by the spirit.

The skeletons of a thousand butterflies
sleep in my place.

There are young mad breezes
over the river.