I am painting the natural landscape with my eyes closed today. It is like writing

A poem with all the cross-outs left in; an expression like never thought I’d see the day.

Nature that begins with unknowable & ends with more monotonous hills.

Today, I want to be the country-fried philosophe or a Hudson River School painting.

When this life is over, describe to me how its concave & convex forms are & are not.

We live amid surfaces, writes Emerson, & the true art of life is to skate well on them.

WILDLIFE

I can see draughty stars drift

inside my skull.

Roots and boles and boughs and leaves

press at the backs of my eyes.

A spider rambles inside my body and

scuttles out of my mouth.

This suit is an agony.

Black flies from the creek fall into my teacup—

keep one eye on the world, they say.

ABOVE US ARE THE LAST LIGHTS

planting something within us

that also represents death for the

taking at every turn;

greeting the season

all coated in soft silver

with a strong handshake;

loving and hating,

those buttons done up all the way

to the top of your sweater.

WINTERING

The stars gave up their deep drifting and touched bottom.

No clouds toppled across the snow wilderness.

No gloom-dark tree-glitter winding and twining its silks.

Blankness, egg-quiet.

The level sprawl of the world drew away tinily, in every direction.

Afternoons remained unknown to each other.

Yet loss keeps thudding past my house, telling me I’m not done.

My hearts, still leaping like rats.

2

2

VER NOVUM

First day of spring—

it’s maintaining, calling, shining.

Probably it hurts its business a little.

/

She sings in response:

What strokes my abdomen, titillates my fur?

My coils sweeten, all tensed and set.

The season is a burst harp.

/

Soirs, evenings. And yet it has some afternoon in it as well.

I don’t need much more than this to fall in love.

/

Reading deeply had incarnadined her cheeks.

/

Maytime! My mint going out of its mind,

my garlic groaning quietly.

I feel like a complete change of circumstances.

/

This time of year challenges you

like a little magician

fanning the day’s cards

brusquely in your face.

Pick a card, any card.

Change the flesh into word.

That word may sound broken into:

you can hear life beating

on its fiery way within it, brutalities

and banalities going about their custom.

/

It was like an oar going into water, gliding.

You could hear the clatter of the stars

coming out, like falling stones

in spring rain, remote from theology.

/

She sits down to dinner

in a casual trattoria,

surrounded by Dionysian big cats,

her racy expat friends.

She sets down a brisk narrative of her life

in loony detail and Taurean pleasure.

She used to sit and cry, thinking about it,

loving it no less.

The spectacle is not discouraging!

The way she beholds it has the sin of pride.

/