His first wife, Elizabeth Fitch, bore eight children; five died in infancy. Taylor wrote more and more sermons and poems.

Sometimes a conceit makes itself necessary in the safety of the impasse between word and world. And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee, writes Taylor.

His parishioners were called to worship in the wilderness with a beat of a drum, amid cold plants, the night coming on, undelivered ashes of stars.

Flocks take to the sky at dusk. I have wondered if the parishioners counted the days.

As in: Did they ever travel past the corrective of the afterworld to stand in the strong spine of rivers? According to Taylor: In Heaven soaring up, I dropt an Eare On Earth: and oh! sweet Melody!

—(Or weren’t there deranged cries in the wilderness, too?)

Taylor’s trust appears both adamantine and vulnerable, like the slow plan of the flowering grass or torn, stilled clouds.

Alone in his study, he writes down some dimensions—

I’m but a Flesh and Blood bag, Oh!

Consider the strange and riotous interior, through which so many nameless things fly.

As weeds continue to idle their tails, leaves molder right on time. In the rafters of the sky, a pristine star shines with unassailability. It can’t be taught a thing.

The wilderness: I cannot get around the back of it.

SELVA ANTICA

What dreams! Those forests!

—SAMUEL BECKETT, ENDGAME

It was a way to think

in the unearthly openness of time.

You stepped away from this world

so that you could consider it from afar.

Did the moon still appear cold and indifferent?

Did a human sound seem singular?

You only remember that there was nothing

to eat in this wilderness,

so that by the time spring came, in generation and decay,

it was not abstract enough for you—

In your want you conjured more blankness,

a prodigious emptiness, the fair schoolroom

of the sky. Paradise would be paper-white,

a way to ease into this nothingness.

GARDEN QUARREL

1. The Change

There was something theatrical in the air,

like the coming of a circus.

I don’t know, the world seemed a dummy run

after that dawn-cold snake.

I realized life could be

like the nest of some tremendous bird.

I was always a religious bitch,

all prolepsis and superstition.

2. Reason Is But Choosing

Eve ate the apple

she tasted the snake

Adam ate Eve

he tasted the apple

Their hunger

had the grandeur

of a famine

A tristesse

falls upon the scene

like a light rainfall

There is something mysterious

about lyric poetry

The long glare walls

of evening

were constructed in a spirit of play

Adam’s a tragédien

Eve opens and closes her legs like a book

No one is waiting for life to begin

Their tears eventually

turn back into

the leaves of the tree

3. Snake

The snake says it needs a tree, so here is a tree.

It says, make the tree stir its tops and play