your fruit, persimmons ripening by coldness.

Your sound a crow cry, a bus idling at night by roadside.

Without apparent effect,

and so you remind of starlight on the colors of a cow’s hide.

Your proposition, like you, is simple, of interest only to the human soul:

vast reach of all that is not, and still something is.

“AH!”: AN ASSAY

When the Greek gods would slip into the clothing and bodies of humans, it was not always as it appeared—not always, that is, for seduction, nor to test the warmth of welcome given to strangers. The sex—like the sudden unveiling and recognition—was not without pleasure. But later, they would remember: “The barley soup offered one night in the village of _____, its wild marjoram, scent of scorched iron, and carrots.” “Ah!, and the ones who turned away from us, how their eyes would narrow and wrinkle the tops of their noses.” “The barnyard odors.” “And afterward, sleep in that salt-scent, close by their manure hoards and feathers.” “Sleep itself!” “Ah!”

For this soft “ah!,” immortals entered the world of bodies.

AGAINST CERTAINTY

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.

Each time I think “this,” it answers “that.”

Answers hard, in the heart-grammar’s strictness.

If I then say “that,” it too is taken away.

Between certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.

When the cat waits in the path-hedge,

no cell of her body is not waiting.

This is how she is able so completely to disappear.

I would like to enter the silence portion as she does.

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,

one shadow fully at ease inside another.

JASPER, FELDSPAR, QUARTZITE

Jasper, feldspar, quartzite, agate, granite, sandstone, slate.

Some can be rounded, some not.

Some can be flaked, some not.

A person, too, holds her lines of possible fracture.

Snow falls over the cities and mountains.

Cries of the late geese pass through it,

forsythia blossoms far inside their buds.

Each pebble, each planet, gives off a recordable singing.

I have heard them.

Monastic the strangeness.

Perhaps, though, that is the only destination—

beauty & strangeness.

Whose notes abandon the instruments that make them.

INSTANT GLIMPSABLE ONLY FOR AN INSTANT

Moment. Moment. Moment.

—equal inside you, moment,

the velocitous mountains and cities rising and falling,

songs of children, iridescence even of beetles.

It is not you the locust can strip of all leaf.

Untouchable green at the center,

the wolf too lopes past you and through you as he eats.

Insult to mourn you, you who mourn no one, unable.

Without transformation,

yours the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens.

The living step forward: choosing to enter, to lose.

I, who am made of you only,

speak these words against your unmasterable instruction—

A knife cannot cut itself open,

yet you ask me both to be you and to know you.

ONE SAND GRAIN AMONG THE OTHERS IN WINTER WIND