What could simply be seen, named, described was not his interest.

Half-close your eyes, he advised, to double the world.

The process of a discovery accomplished was his interest,

its after-savoring his appetite and his pleasure.

While he wrote, the peppered moths

of industrial London were growing darker with an internalized protective soot.

While he wrote, the last illegal slave ships were still coming in.

In his 150-year-old prose there is only one word you might recognize as archaic.

Omission his characteristic gesture;

stepping into the thought that thought cannot enter

his characteristic desire.

While he wrote, the ongoing, quiet famine of laborers paid below costs of housing and food.

While he wrote, the ongoing, unquiet emptying of the Plains.

These things happened under the culture’s floorboards and behind its walls.

These things happened beneath the lids of half-closed eyes.

It is not precisely true that they are absent, though it is true they do not appear.

Whether they were for him

embraced or subsumed in his offered terrors cannot be known.

While he wrote, Turgenev, Goethe,

and this lithe-legged haiku of Issa from the other side of the world:

Spider,

do not worry.

I keep house casually.

In Poe the worry is like the long-cooled lead in Baltimore house-glass, settled and clear.

THE REFUSAL

The usual stories are of foxes and thick-pelted wolves,

but even a house rat will gnaw off a leg if it must.

Some travel on three legs as swiftly as four.

Swimming is harder,

though my friend’s three-legged wolfhound can still catch a rabbit.

Easy to wish the rat well, now it is gone,

I who have stared at the trap for years,

refusing the clear necessity, the dream-command.

DOG AND BEAR

The air this morning,

blowing between fog and drizzle,

is like a white dog in the snow

who scents a white bear in the snow

who is not there.

Deeper than seeing,

deeper than hearing,

they stand and glare, one at the other.

So many listen lost, in every weather.

The mind has mountains,

Hopkins wrote, against his sadness.

The dog held the bear at bay, that day.

DOWNED BRANCH

I wanted to be intimate to my own life.

What came were

the many eating their way through the tree.

Night of no wind, the grass littered with unripe apples.

The limb fell hard.

It was not

the weight of the apples but the many eating,

even on the ground still eating,

anonymous and steady.

Someone else could name them, genus, species.

Someone else could feel for them affection.

I wanted the intimate knowledge

they had of the tree.

Wanted their simple and ruinous hunger,

made without distinction of the lived-in tree.

VILNIUS

For a long time

I keep the guidebooks out on the table.

In the morning, drinking coffee, I see the spines:

St. Petersburg, Vilnius, Vienna.

Choices pondered but not finally taken.

Behind them—sometimes behind thick fog—the mountain.

If you lived higher up on the mountain,