The fields are infertile
as far as I can tell.
Their winter systems
sparkle like the diamonds
that pelt Neptune.

Limpid silvers
reflect in the dark
museums and theaters
back in town.

To them we run
to elevate our eyes
to a well-shaped ethics.
Colors are supplied
by our nervous minds.

ÔÇó

Towards a just
and invisible image
behind each substance
and its place in a sentence
you must have been walking.

Well-defended, best
when lost from wanting.

Be like grass, she told me,

The overweight, overnight parts
that came to me in a dream.

Their clothes no longer fit,
it was this that brought them
to me crying, their faces twitching.

That had to end. No, they said,
it didn"t. So I rolled over to ghosts
that couldn"t dent a pillow.

The clock shed. Night pulled its
burdens into harbor and I woke,
glad for the day, its telltale light,

its flying minute, that genie work,
and the everlasting perturbations
of my people, their glories,

their heavy last words,
and for these, I rose.

The evidence was in and it went to the contrary.
The contrary wound around us rather like a river.
The river reacted, spider-like, tangling up its legs
with other wet parts we thought we knew,
such as creeks and fjords and deltas and such.

A beaver sits on the riverbank watching all of this unfold.
He doesn"t know what a fjord is, and he doesn"t care
for other waters, or even other beavers, or the merest
hint of other business, so he removes this evidence.

Then he builds a structure which for years he is rehabbing.

I moved my chair into sun
I sat in the sun
the way hunger is moved when called fasting.

Once, I
was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,
sleepy and nameless.

As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.

Light on the neck-nape
of time
as two wings of one starling,

or lovers so happy
neither needs think of the other.

Re-reading him in Bouchon
past noon, it is mobbed midtown,
like an ant farm seen through painkillers.
God, what a bust it"s all been,
capitalism, communism, feminism,
this lust to liberate.
Che should have stayed in medicine.
The girls here admit they can"t wait
to marry and get to the alimony,
before they hit thirty. The men,
heads skinned like Lager inmates,
know only the revolutions
in diets and spinning classes.
Still, one table away,
these two, with gnarled empretzled hands,
seem unhappy in the old way.

capable of feeling
while in contact with another?

I look at the red-tiled roofs outside,
at all the angles

facing the white-blue cloudless sky
like the creases in Bellini"s angel"s

silver-blue dress, Tintoretto"s white one
that"s practically transparent in his

Annunciazione at the San Rocco
— cloth complex as thought!

Then the bells start, flood the void.

In Kyoto, never —
glowing leaves in the garden,
snow on the peaks.

We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims —

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,

Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying.
The past is a fox the hunters are flaying.
Nothing unspoken goes without saying.
Love"s a casino where lovers risk playing.
The future"s a marker our hearts are prepaying.

The future"s a promise there"s no guaranteeing.
Today is a fire the field mice are fleeing.
Love is a marriage of feeling and being.
The past is a mirror for wishful sightseeing.
Nothing goes missing without absenteeing.

Nothing gets cloven except by dividing.
The future is chosen by atoms colliding.