poles through the tarp. Rotting thatch of the summerhouse. What is the earth? Brew pub of purgatory, slop bucket of souls. In a nutshell. Gravy.
Nettle
for Patricia Goedicke
Green clusters of soft beads, the nettle is flowering. When I disappear, you said, write and tell me everything. Snakes slide, when they hear my footsteps, further into the weeds. The tide shudders as it turns over each stone. Is this what it was like as earth began to end? It started out in loneliness and turned to poetry. Here: a scribble of seabirds, a peak across the Sound, so distant and vague, like your death to me. Last night, an Iranian doctor performed that tongue-cry she had heard the Arabs use at weddings and funerals. She had examined Fidel Castro and pronounced him fit, four times more charismatic than Clinton. Somehow, I thought you would want to know. Everyone is starting to take on the appearance of ghosts. Rain tips the needles of the cedar. If our days are the ritual we perform for the dead. If our days are the ritual we perform for the dead. I wade into the current and leave it open for you. I find excuses to say your name.
The Nightingale’s Excuse
Wind, as we walk on the plains. I am crazy about you, that extreme subjectivity. So we duck for the coulees, which is where the cattle go, wearing the ground down between the junipers. Piss-green, to match my peevish mood. Our lives have changed. How is it we didn’t notice? We are gray haired, wandering among ruins. The berries in the drylands are pithy and thick. Tin and glass tossed intact into the gullies. Who knows? Perhaps we are at the end of time. Blue aromatics tucked behind our ears. The nightingale’s excuse: she is too much in love with the rose. Too fiercely jealous to leave. Are you a plant, a tree, the phlox, the sage? You cannot weigh much less than the moon. I am not used to sharing the green-robed angels on high. But here I am, trusting them with you. Between the wagon trail of the quest and the swell of the new, there is a crowded city pouring through the heart. And the self? Nest constructed of field grass and flower paste. One the masters say we must give up.
II.
Winter Bouquet
Winter bouquet (yellow carnations). Winter Still Life (pomegranate drawn with the figures of a dream). The tiniest fleck of rock the wind tears off. I think of the stars. How can I? A man sets himself on fire to protest the war. A man is tortured inside a prison until he cannot speak. In our curtained days, in our walks along the railroad beds, constructing our alter egos, our additional force. Winter bouquet (rosehips, snowberry, spruce needles). Winter bouquet (oil of fir rubbed into my gloves). A famous Danish artist constructs a crystal sun and people queue up outside the museum to see it. It grieves and buries the heart, a throbbing stone. It lifts the heart, a rose stripped of its petals. What if the morning never comes? Deep shade the winter feeds in, our ministrations too close, tracing flowers, unearthly fruit inside the margins. And doing what, the winds unruly. Here, you say, bringing my gloves to my face, see as if the days will sometime lighten.
Almost Ice
after Morris Graves
We left the house to winter, the book with only a few pages left to read. Most of the important people we had made time for. The snow bedded down like a herd of antelope between the tufts of yellow grass. And along the bank, the water slowed into a kind of lace. Moth plus. Almost ice. Barges grind against the pier. A sound with the sound of glass in it. A knife through frosting. What I like, you say, is that a whole beautiful day will disappear, and then part of a day that was not particular will take its place. The pace we keep, walking, light as ghosts. Sun circular and ancient behind a scrim. Like something from a myth, the one where the desert slopes are dug up, and a petrified forest is discovered underneath. White writing. The morning is quiet and blurred. The way strangers who love to read talk to each other. When the artist lived in the country, he painted the sounds of the night, inventing the invisible animals from what he heard.
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