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At least at night, a streetlight is better than a star. And better good shoes on a long walk than a good friend. Often in winter with my old cap I slip away into the gloom like a happy fish, at home with all I touch, at the level of love. No one can surface till far, far on, and all that we’ll have to love may be what’s near in the cold, even then.
It was russet light, Orchard Lane, white-shingle colonials and the ch ch of the sprinklers, small rainbows in twilight, the fabric smell of funeral parlor on us From a fence we fell to the fairway on all fours, a sky of purple berries, my hand swollen from a doubleheader, Ho Chi Minh, a tin sound in the air.
Beyond the hedgerow, just a scritch, barely human form, so close to being landscapey themselves— two triangles away from serious grazing sheep, indistinct as growing grass.
Just as the blue tip of a compass needle stills to north, you stare at a pencil with sharpened point, a small soapstone bear with a tiny chunk of turquoise tied to its back, the random pattern of straw flecked in an adobe wall; you peruse the silver poplar branches, the spaces between branches, and as a cursor blinks, situate at the edge of loss—the axolotl was last sighted in Xochimilco over…
Look at the birds.
I stood at the southwest window for a long time just staring out at the field and empty road.
A single apple grew on our tree, which was some kind of miracle because it was a pear tree.
By the time you’re forty, you’ve met so many people their features fall in place as little bits from other people, like the Identi-Kits that victims piece together with the police.
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock, The hand impervious to nervous shock, The future proofed against our vain suspense; But since the tideline of the incoming past Is where we walk, and it is air we breathe, Remember then our only shape is death When mask and face are nailed apart at last. Range-finding laughter, and ambush of tears, Machine-gun practice…
So I thought Mouthfeel was it, but I hate that title a lot more than I did last time.
Here might a man, childlike, unbind his boots, Go with bared feet, and sometimes, pausing, stand To feel with the foot’s depth the years of mold Through which the buried roots, the living roots Climb down to levels more profoundly old— Eons of rock, centuries of sand. Here might the foot feel and the slowed mind feel What the root feels in its deep wanderings.
Yes, I changed the name of these things already.
Groping back to bed after a piss I part thick curtains, and am startled by The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness. Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky. There’s something laughable about this, The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart (Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below) High and preposterous and…
Early October and the harvest, the shock and the cold dark rough transport. This morning the pear, sweet ripened Comice, is ready to share her story of orchard and sun, to let me drink in, let me sing, her mortal sugar.
I cannot worry about what lies beneath the surface, so I walk into the fragile dusk, breaking the backs of field mice still asleep under the snow. The sunlight that does not reach me illuminates the distance between this world and God’s, where winter is simply the white of perfect concentration. I would like to believe in God, just as I would like to believe there is an angel weeping beneath the…
It was so loud it was so quiet we didn't sleep we slept. We didn't dream.
The seed of an iron flower must grow in gravel or else make its own if it is taken from the desert and sunk in loam. What a hard garden, lovers: iron is used to the routine of oil but gets the bloody rust in damp: there, the oasis, a devotion in the sand, prays flesh, virus to mammoth, and supports them all, but when the regular iron flowers in sensuous ease it languishes; the bloom weeps dust.
Don’t walk barefoot in the bathroom. There was someone in the mirror who I killed. God bless your hair-brush.
Maybe what a river loves most about the banks that hold it—that appear to hold it— is their willingness or resignation to being mere context for the river’s progress or retreat, depending.
Nothing I know wants nothing, even stones. I’ve seen them lying in the riverbed, exhausted, toward the end of summer, and the river has thinned down to a film of pure transparency, when the stones revolted and rose against the river banks, which moved against them with such rootedness and loamy weight, they fell back shouting to the stars from which they’d come, don’t leave us. Which the stars…
