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Journal

That was the year I wrote the one book entirely out of doors,
each of its lines and words among trees or in a field.

I wrote from late afternoon until I could no longer see.
In the perfect unmutilated dark pages still shown.

I lived alone by the river and had very little—a pencil,
telescope, and hive for bees.

One morning in the fetal light, a white horse and a red one appeared.
One horse white as paper, the other red as blood.


They would feed, heads bowed to the field.

What did it mean as they moved just this side of the trees
unpurpling toward green. Then I watched them disappear.

One became a drift of snow melting, the other a fire dying from blaze.


I watched the sun, its gold light gallop, then slowly rove
through the curves of a skull.

To find there doors and windows gone. —Sunrise, pond, candle.

These are stories begun beyond the body
that can no longer be rescued with hand or glance.

Shadow

In the dream they put the perfect money in God's
mouth I mean the bodies they put our bodies
in God's mouth we die that way I think
we're swallowed whole a sexual thing it is
all we never believed become us so that we are
everything and nothing at once as soon as
you grasp it it's gone that's why I want to place the then
on your lap like a shiny plate heavy with the fresh
shadow of food you would swallow "would" ha
ha (did I say shadow I meant slaughter) I think
you're beginning to understand what's going this
light leaking from bodies we once called truth.

X

Because every thought is either memory or desire, the world


pulls away on both sides. Anyone's wish is a bird, and a wish


unfulfilled the unwinged skull, but a seed—fuzzy—pushes


its past toward tomorrow, all flutter and ecstasy. That's why


whenever I see people touch, I place a small white X where they


stood. Chalk, wind. Rock of sugar. Rock of salt. We spend our lives


licking at both. We sleep, eat, cry, sing. I like most when


it snows, when I must reinvent the shivering marvel of each


X, as knowledge is recollection, and love all discovery without delay.

Even Now

Still I try to remember when you first caught
fire, the barely visible flames about shoulders and arms
accentuating everything you touched, and I first saw
through words into their origins and hearts. I watched
you reach for a glass dissolving in air, while your
sight tore holes in an April world drowning
in rain and flowers. We walked through a park where
you stuck your hand in a young retriever's mouth, feeling
the hot pink gums and new teeth, while a little girl
wearing a ladybug cape swooped, singing over the grass
as bees droned is, is over the jonquils. We drove
to the country and walked through fields and meadows
and stood beneath an orchard's new gauze where you
talked of the past, picking chunks of time like invisible
fruit, and I could feel the rivers and trees engrave us.
We entered a half-built house, flooded with sky, and you
said, "There, there and there bodies will blossom."
I remember how it began to rain but you did not get
wet. How the fragrant wood smelled like a ripening fruit.
The sun came out as the evening grew long, and where
you lay down in the field to sleep there was only a red glow
resembling coals in a fire, a warmth I can feel, even now.

Asking

They asked a dying man if life was everything. He said
yes. They asked a young man if love was everything. He
said yes. "But we only live through love," they said. They
were like a cloud and spoke as though they'd been
here before. "Please," he said. "One more day, week,
year." I remember the happiness I felt when the knife-blade
slipped on my finger in the open field. —The smell
of blood, rain, earth. I saw the wild iris's sheer violet
silk in the late sunlight and I knew. I saw the cows
bowed to the wet earth and wild timothy, shagging the flames
of their tails, and I knew these things were true, outside,
beyond the moment the way the wings of the swallows blown
sheer gauze in the light seem beyond the sheer body of sky,
or how a place remembered with a friend is lifted beyond
all maps when that friend is gone. Memory is beautifully
static, and yet we move while life and its events arrive
lifted in a sudden wind, or are held there unnoticed, arranging
themselves into a bouquet. In this way eternities pass
until we are gone and happy and in want of nothing.

ForPoetry