So far the house still is standing.

So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster

still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life.

An almost readable language.

Like the radio heard while travelling in a foreign country—

you know that something important has happened, but not what.

ENVY: AN ASSAY

A mother sings to her infant,

Most beautiful in all the world, and you stand helpless.

Wind outside the window,

looking in with shackled ankles, wrists.

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime.

Yet you, too, had a mother. Had two sisters.

A photo shows the bone structure’s slow shifting:

your face, small, blurred with something almost sorrow,

peers between them.

HESITATION: AN ASSAY

Sometimes only a slowing

so momentary it can scarcely be seen—

as if a dog,

chasing something large and swift and important,

were distracted by the white tremor of an overhead moth.

Other times a full lifetime tentative, lost.

The line of the roof in a child’s crayoned drawing

can show a hesitation almost fatal.

The rain

comes to it hard or less hard,

knowing nothing of hesitation’s rake-toothed debate.

And the two lovers

now concealed around the corner?

They fool no one, not even themselves,

pausing in their own shadows outside a locked door.

If pleasure requires prolonging, then these lovers.

Yet slowness alone is not to be confused

with the scent of the plum tree just before it opens.

ONCE: AN ASSAY

Once wakes up in the morning, brews coffee,

goes outside in its bathrobe to bring the paper from the street.

Once notices the day is possible rain.

At the same time, Once is lightly climbing a tree,

a tall sycamore

slanting over a late-summer stream.

A single yellow leaf at once floats down.

A water snake flows one way, the leaf the other.

Once goes with both.

Then coils in a spring-latched doorknob,

while also swinging its large head around

to scratch the itch that troubles one coarse-haired hip.

Once knows again exists

but this is theoretical knowledge.

Thus Once is ceaselessly tender, though without large passion.

Once doesn’t know any better and so loves this world,

in which babies starve, after long enough,

in silence.

Is Once heartless?

—You may well ask,

who pass your life inside its large, dry hand.

Once turns its face toward the question:

a horse-shaped clock of bright blue plastic, with red tail.

The dream its whinny wakes you from is also Once’s.

This sneeze, this pain, this rage or weeping: one moment only.

Leaving, Once takes in its pocket your slightest sigh.

Just try to breathe it again, Once murmurs. You’ll see.

If you protest, it is Once’s own and only protest.

If you agree, it is Once that for its instant accedes.

This Möbius is hard to understand but easy to manufacture.

A single strip of paper, turned once, and it’s yours.

BURLAP SACK

A person is full of sorrow