idea purely; and
then of a man convinced
he has justified
brilliantly himself to
himself; and then
of the yearling that,
haltered at
last, remains
still to be gentled, to be
broken-to-ride, although
no yearling, not a horse
ever, and not dream.
I turned.
I could see,
across the room,
heaped there like fouled
linen like memory like
detritus stepped
away from, the truth of
—of myself: glintless,
yes, but no
more so for my having (how
long?) disavowed it.
Suggestive of sorrow,
or the cool irreversibility that
attaches commonly to
larger mistakes
of judgment—so did it
lie there: undiminished.
I take it, in the darkness, to my face.
LOOSE HINGE
Of the body: most,
its resilience, have you
not loved that, its—its
endingness,
that too?
And the unwitting
prayer getting made
between them,
as when we beat at
what is closed,
closed against us, and call
the beating, in time,
song. To have been
among the hands
for which the stone lets go
its sword,
or the tree its gold
crepitating
bough,
what must that
feel like? With what speed
does the hero grow
used to—necessarily—
the world’s surrender
until—how
else—how call it
strange, how
not inevitable? Heroes,
in this way at least, resembling
the damned
who are damned
as traitors, some
singing We could not
help it, others
Fate,
Circumstance,
X
made me—as if
betrayal required more than
one party, which it
does not.
Admit it: you gave
yourself away. We are
exactly what
we are, as you
suspected, and—
like that—the world
obliging with its fair
examples: rain and,
under it, the yard
an overnight field
of mushrooms,
the wet of them, the yellow-
white of, the
nothing-at-all, outside
themselves, they
stood for. You’ve been
a seeming
exception only. Hot;
relentless. Yourself the rule.
THE THRESHING
A sweetness, say—
and coming, on me. Or, in
almost-squares,
light dismissible at
first as that which,
surely— Did I
dream that?
Between
what by now lies far
behind, and what
ahead still, gets
forged a life that,
whether or not I can
recall having
called it mine own
—or say so
now—will have been
the case, notwithstanding:
as when a smaller
fate, this time, fumbles
clear of one larger, flies
free, how the usual
questions—is this
nature? design?
whose?—
alter none of the
particulars of escape,
of the being foiled.
If the world is
godless, then
an absence I am
always with, and
it with me. Or
else the world is
stitched with gods and
unavoidably I am
with them,
they with me.
To be reduced to
nothing, literally, but a life
to lose; to surrender
that, also, to those
whispering Yes, yes,
that also— Isn’t this
the idea? To give, even
full well knowing that
they might take it,
they might not, their
gaze—as if by some
city more new
and glittering than
the last one graced
briefly then lifted
out of—their gaze
distracted.
Point at which
who seeks, with the
swerveless patience that
hunger, for a time,
affords, shall find
his target—stilling,
stopped. No room
for wanting. —Was this
not the idea?
The hands: as if only
made for this—
Should the eyes not
be, already,
shut,
then you must shut them.
THE SILVER AGE
Naturally, the lawn fills
in, where you
repaired it.
Of the two
trees left,
one dying,
the parts of the tree
across which disease gets
laid, like a map,
out,
and the other parts,
putting forth still their
late, bright,
October buds—berries—
which one?
What’s to
stay for, in a slow
drama whose end we know
already?
This morning,
it seems impossible,
that question, to have ever
asked it,
that I did not
always recognize
a pleasure—
baroque,
acquired—findable
only inside the particular
chord that an ever-building body
of evidence
makes, finally,
with the very fact it can’t
help but
lead to.
After which, though
a bit surprised where,
before, was hope, or
doubt, We suspected
as much, we say. We knew
all along
what the light would
be like—
a grazing
weightlessness; what
leaves, in turn;
sprawl of the sleeper’s
legs
his chest
his face
TO BREAK, TO RIDE
That, nightly,
some blooms fold,
some open; how
the opossum at the same
hour forages the same swatch
of yard; and the moth,
a shadow, all
over again navigates
more shadow—
There’s a knowing born
of conquering;
conscious at first,
or never, reflexive finally,
a mastery of pattern,
how a thing changes—
light,
a difference in it,
an absence of—
the better to mark and
react in turn to
when, of a sudden, pattern
stops: where
is danger?
what is safe? This
kind of knowing, it is like
a ladder. It is
scales, in music:
though I believe that the earth
rotates, what I
notice more is
the moon appearing,
what I’d rather
remember is another
story—concerns a boat,
routine, the bearing
away of one
brightness, the fact
of others,
smaller, more of. How
still, beside me. The difference
between us the same as
that between a garden
shaped by patience,
attention,
plan,
and a field to which
an unexpected heat in late
October brings
now the worker bees
confused, instinctive,
back. If a sadness
to it, then
no more lets me go than
I let it go. It is waste,
to worry. We shall never
be more close than we are now.
ENTRY
As if an ark—
or,
like one, how slow …
How it does not seem
to leave the shore or
want to so much as—more,
whatever it must, already, it is
letting go.
On the water, a stillness that
should not be
so terrible. Why
is it? What so satisfied,
before, about distortion
that, now, I miss it?
There should be birds,
sky-strung, and
following, isn’t that what
happens in the wake,
at first, of a sea
departure? To have
ever heard such or—once
heard—to have
trusted in it—
Which is worse,
the incidental, or the more
deliberate? How
much of what seems
deliberate isn’t, is
instead unavoidably
inherent, a fact
of character, of the self
no one chooses—
incidental, therefore. The blame
that lies always
somewhere matters
here—seems to—no
more than whether I wave or don’t
at the nothing, almost, left
to wave at. I am
farther, even, than I imagined,
or hoped for, or
against— Which?
There should be custom,
conduct, some
compass fashioned out of
rules by which to fix
not on failure’s
occurrence—what needs
no marker—but on,
of that occurrence, what degree
exactly. Surely even a
precision concerning
the difficult-to-admit-to will have
had its pleasures? The air,
for example, heavy,
less with blooming than with
the thought of. A collapse
of vision; the rise,
accordingly, of craft—
here,
between the two, where neither
one, to the other, gives
ever itself up
entirely, the narrowest space,
opening:
it shuts behind me.
THREE
BLUE SHOULDER
Come here.
See how the boughs pass
idly over, across
one another, return
after, as a hand
can do
with what never will be
possessed—only
wanted, touched only—
and then to its original position come
less unpunished than
untempted toward what is punishable
back slowly.
This is the way
a house shakes
in a wind—the way, in the throat,
song does. Hear it? This is
the kind of rain that
so much looks like not
stopping, we get used to it,
an end to falling becomes
the last thing we expected,
and—there, an ending. I think
pleasure is like that, or
can be, I think
you are.
The snow,
what remains of it, slides
melted, free from an earlier
stranding-place among
storm-stunted rhododendrons—
the leaves in turn find
again the pose of here-no-there
remembering,
or asking,
what did a snowlessness
once resemble? To ask as much
maybe should not
be to open, however
narrow, a door
on suffering—I think it can be. If you
will not stay, go now.
SPOKEN PART, FOR COUNTERTENOR VOICE
I. Carolina Window
Through the glass, spillage—
no longer half-explaining
the story—becomes the story:
limb tree thicket
until, further, the wooded miles.
A field of view, which is to say
finite. Making what is
continuous and whole
seem discrete, divisible, as
if to the material world and our
vision of it could be assigned
the same properties, which
is impossible—a variety, at
best, of hoping. Not hope itself.
II. Window, Graham Chapel
the hours lean, almost—
time a ghost, granted only
part of its wish: substance, but
without visibility. —Color, or
the light, angling shine,
something gives to the face
of Christ the look of one who
understands, like never before,
damage as the song with which
the sleeve of God comes lined.
Necessity to shadow, as any
wind to the branch inside it.
There’s a flaw in the glass.
ROCK HARBOR
The wind was high—it gave to your
hair a lift in equal parts gradual,
steep, disarming—
I love a storm,
and said so; by I have always
loved better the wreckage after,
I did not mean instead of, but
a preference.
To the air, an edge
anyone would call arctic—isn’t
that why we left it nameless? To
your face, a look I’d admired before
in the bodies of those who seem
not so much indifferent as made
ignorant, or stunned as if by
sudden luck, or else repentant and
in payment, somehow, for what
all price falls like an irrelevance,
a stole, an expensive sail in a
calm away from. Sex
as a space available where neither
loss nor regret figures—imagine
that.
Or not having, finally, to take
anything away—in the form of
photographs of the mostly ice
that the harbor’s water, the shore
past that, the street after had
become; or as words like those
that came to me: green, kind of,
lit almost, but as if from within
in places, a spill but
an arrested one, less force than
the idea of it, block and edge like
the chance for pattern, but
spent now or only, from the very
start, false
—false and singing.
The wind was high; it exaggerated
what you were already, a man
returning toward shelter he can’t
see yet, but believes just ahead
exists, the sort of man for whom
to doubt at all is treason. By
not unfaithful, I understood I
could mean both things: I’d do
nothing I’d promised not to—
Also, there is nothing I’ll forget.
FOUR
TRADE
Bending—as no
flower bends—
casting the difficult rule
of his attention upon an elsewhere
that accordingly broke open
into a splendor that, too,
would pass,
I am resigned,
mostly,
said the emperor,
to a history between us less of loss than,
more protractedly, of losing—
and, having said as much, said
nothing else to the man to
whom he’d said it;
whom, for years now, he’d called
variously paramour,
consort,
sir; who, for
himself, said nothing;
who from where he was seated could
see, and easily,
each at its labeled and color-coded slip
moored slackly,
the bows of the ships of the Fleet
Imperial, about which
what he found, just
then, most worth admiring it
is impossible, anymore, to
say exactly:
the trim of them,
flawless, sleek—reminiscent, in
that way, of almost any line from Ovid; or
when there was wind,
how the bows tipped,
idly,
in it;
or the stillness, afterwards,
that they found; or the way they seemed to.
TO THE TUNE OF A SMALL, REPEATABLE, AND PASSING KINDNESS
In the cove of hours-like-a-dream this
is, it isn’t so much
that we don’t enjoy watching
a view alter rather little, and each time
in the same shift-of-a-cloud
fashion. It’s the
swiftness with which we
find it easier, as our cast
lines catch more and more at nothing,
to lose heart—
All afternoon, it’s
been with the fish as with
lovers we’d come to think of as
mostly forgotten, how
anymore they less often themselves
surface than sometimes
will the thought of them—less
often, even, than that, their names …
But now the fish bring to mind
—of those lovers—
the ones in particular
who were knowable
only in the way a letter written
in code that resists
being broken fully can be