If the song is beautiful, you will listen. In the field one day outside the residency, I encounter, or think I encounter, the bird that’s charmed the opera singer. I am near a row of acacia trees when I hear its sudden, piercing trill of notes rise and fall. It could be any kind of bird, really, any kind of song. A cry of sex or terror, a mimicry of its parents or an invention all its own. A flourish it will teach to its offspring, its own embellishments branching through the ancient notes. It is the sound of time. It is the sound of time passing.

*

I stand in the field. I whistle back.

III

III

Quiver

Quiver

after Carl Phillips

What do we do

with memory, do we burn

or do we embellish it, do we

study it as we do the elk

projected onto the archery

studio screen, summer’s

gelatin halo shivering

between the antlers, replayed

whether or not

anyone will come

to practice on or witness it: is this

what memory is:

static, unchangeable

mind we step into

and the clearing opens: again,

light rain, the scent

of moss, puffs of steam

rising off the slick,

black muzzle? Does the image,

over time, brighten

so feverishly inside us,

tearing through

the eye, the mind, the body: is it we

who wander out now, tentative,

into late morning light?

What does it mean

to forget so much,

happily, greedily, if not

that we are nourished most

on loss? The video

spools, the elk steps into

then out of its field;

who cares, it was dead

the second the camera

found it anyway, captured

and projected endlessly

so that we might practice making it

dead again.

Is this the image to convince you

of the blinding

limits to our world?

Is this another entry

to your newest opening?

The animal turns, the screen

inside its body shakes:

open, bright, pocked

by tips of arrows

that never find their mark.

Gokstadt/Ganymede

Gokstadt/Ganymede

In memoriam X, 1969–2016

In this obituary your wife, now widow,

posts, I find a photo of you running a hand

along Gokstadt’s blackened bow,

mizzen snapped, the nail bolts sanded

down by time. The photo could have been my own:

the same milk light dousing this Oslo hall

we separately visited, each drawn here alone

by myths we’d studied together in school.

Now the ship’s grounded in perpetuity, hoisted

onto beetle-leg pylons. Night’s maw. King’s casket.

I study your face as you peer at a joist:

one plank jutting just out of concert, forever

a flaw, its weathered woods shellacked

and splayed, never to be smoothed back together.

Not odd, they’d said of your cousin, just shy.

All summer, he shadowed you, huge

in the cabin’s outhouse doorway where you

hunched, a child unable to escape his hands,

one cinder-block palm smothering your cries—

After which you returned silent, wild-eyed