Then, I’d make an instrument from the ruins,

something awfully beautiful.

I would sit down to eat as if I were reading a poem.

I would observe how the night

went into the day with a special grandeur.

It could be like swallowing a sword and growing surprised

by how good it is, how it opens.

And then maybe to sing out with a throat like that—

saying look,

look how the world has touched me.

EARTHQUAKE WEATHER

Art is not the lie

that tells the truth.

Sometimes it calls me

later than usual to say less.

Earthquakes originate

well out of the reach

of real weather.

When your fear of them

turns

to desire,

at least

conceal your excitement,

so that I can think about

new feelings

and new problems

in relative peace, apart from

cause and effect.

THE DARK WORLD

Pierre looks out the prison window and laughs and laughs, because the world is inside him.

I’m terrified because I love the world but which one.

It snows all afternoon, but in the west, the canyons are cooling in the shifting natural light.

Each world curls at its edges, and yet I am ever biddable in either direction.

Here is the interior holding up its torn roots in front of your eyes, seigneurial and glittering.

I taste it slowly, the afternoon being as wide as a death. I hear the wind and the snow in the wind.

I’m half open and half shut—

dragging the chains of the day through the fat blood of a life, listening to the mathematics of one season drifting over to another.

I want bars again, restaurants that stay open late, gossip in the kitchen; the bright tessellations of painful wishing, movies, plumes of envy, flower stalls.

Let me stay awake, as whole worlds keep arriving with raggedness, with their synoptic force.

CLIFFS

Words are afraid up here.

The rapture and the terrifying exposure.

Strange birds roosting, a human voice shouting a world’s-end shout.

Snow hurries to the meeting, wanting to cover the waking in my body.

I could fill up the sea with this waking.

The outlook is thrilling; it satisfies.

It goes even further than the view from the heights of love.

It eats the roof off the sky.

Notes

NOTES

“Ver Novum” borrows “Affection chains thy tender days” from William Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona. “Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce” is from John Donne’s “The Triple Fool.”

“Selva Antica” borrows the line “the fair schoolroom of the sky” from Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins “I shall know why—when Time is over,” from R. W. Franklin’s #215 variorium edition of 1998.

“The Concert” borrows its final two lines from a Czesław Miłosz interview in The Paris Review, “The Art of Poetry. No. 70.”

“Remarks on My Sculpture” borrows its title and first line from artist Fred Sandback’s statement, “Remarks on My Sculpture, 1966–86.”

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS