Spades take up leaves

No better than spoons,

And bags full of leaves

Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise

Of rustling all day

Like rabbit and deer

Running away.

But the mountains I raise

Elude my embrace,

Flowing over my arms

And into my face.

I may load and unload

Again and again

Till I fill the whole shed,

And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,

And since they grew duller

From contact with earth,

Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use,

But a crop is a crop,

And who’s to say where

The harvest shall stop?

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square

With the new city street it has to wear

A number in. But what about the brook

That held the house as in an elbow-crook?

I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength

And impulse, having dipped a finger length

And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed

A flower to try its currents where they crossed.

The meadow grass could be cemented down

From growing under pavements of a town;

The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.

Is water wood to serve a brook the same?

How else dispose of an immortal force

No longer needed? Staunch it at its source

With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown

Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone

In fetid darkness still to live and run—

And all for nothing it had ever done

Except forget to go in fear perhaps.

No one would know except for ancient maps

That such a brook ran water. But I wonder

If from its being kept forever under,

The thoughts may not have risen that so keep

This new-built city from both work and sleep.

                                                       14

And there was silence in the pulsing air,
         While in the noon sun fluttered banners gay—
A lull that breathed the courage of despair;
         A hush which meant a pause in which to pray,
There youths whose lives had never known a care 
         Confronted veterans with locks of aged gray;
Before the cool glare of the veteran,
The blue-eyed youth stood dauntless, man to man.

Mornings fell on neighborhoods turned white 
grids of ash; the odd surviving objects

like antiquities—a dish intact, a child’s toy—
became remarkable. It was a year of fires 

in wine country. Another year burning. 
The far land veined with bright, raging bands 

that worked a century of dust-
to-dust in a single night. One woman

lived by jumping in a swimming pool,
treading water while the red

and smoke-drowned night 
passed over her. Daylight 

found the house eaten 
and the fire moved on. Her shoes

half-melted on the deck
just cool enough to wedge her feet in.

She walked out into the dawn-lit
flurry of cinder. A naked Eve

in this reverse creation, 
the newly unmade world.

Once there was a bridge I couldn’t cross. 
Cusp of summer. Sound of insects
carried with me, from Melville’s fields
in my-heart-on-the-bridge, their zzzz.

Year’s end, now. A theory of edges. A vow
to complete certain tasks—they will not
improve me, but dissipate, burn off 
like vapor. I’ve already been too good.

I thought keys would fly out of my pocket 
and then I would have to fly after, 
to enter the terrifying room 
where things blow away to.

Scraps of lists, a paper flower,
the raspberry clouds of the day’s 
attenuation. A series of signs said 
help was there, but not for me.

      ^{—after Dante Di Stefano}

The music of smishing
hides its meaning, a type
of online fraud. Nurdle makes me
smile, until I read it’s plastic

choking the ocean. Girl Dinner
is not three plates of my mom’s
lasagna, but meager bites and leftovers. Brainrot
sounds like what it is, as does

enshittification and global
boiling. I feel a fever coming
scrolling through Merriam Webster’s
youngest words—until I hit jorts, remember

June. Soon I’ll shed these wools
of my first winter in Upstate New York,
where cold damp clusters under
skin. A word for that? I ask

the chatbot, who says, “Ooh, I love this
kind of invention” before delivering
chillmur: That creeping, whispery sensation …
subtle but insistent, like fog

slipping in. A word for fear
of chatbots? Scriptechxia. For
the breed of ennui that tempts
poets to query them

for language? Lexadeference or
verbadelegate or thinksourcing. Not
bad. Isn’t it time I peeled myself
from the couch, touched grass, 

left the digital sphere to run
my fingers through Binghamton’s hair,
the astroturf of my neighbor’s lawn? Knockoff
of what the brand AstroTurf

rolled out in Houston’s Astrodome
in 1966. The stadium’s name a nod
to the city’s NASA Mission Control,
which led the first astronauts

to land on the moon. Or did they land?
My friend swears no. I’m not sure
of much, except it’s hard to say
what’s true. We suspect the higher-ups

have hidden motives for telling us
so. The feds, my parents, their Catholic
god, AI, this sense, despite all I know
of marrow, of wind in my bones.

I text my yoga teacher: I think I need
to start medication. I meant

meditation, but the subconscious
knows best. I once wrote a whole poem

about the angel of penetration
rather than admit in my haste

I meant angle of penetration.
Either way, a virgin ascends.

I return a can of paint to the store
because I can’t manage any more

pain, I meant paint. I mean pain.
I keep going back for pain samples

I don’t need. I have gallons of different
shades stored in the basement. Enough

for a fresh coat every year. I don’t take
the medication. There’s nothing worse

than a dull coat of pain. I prefer it
bright and sharp.

^{To see a world in a grain of sand …
—from “Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake}

We are Starseeds  
                   every one of us –  
                                                     you & me,  
                       & me and you  
                           & him & her,  
                                                    & them  
                                                    & they  
                                                    & those  
                    Who know of this  
                         are truly blessed  …  

 True for all  
                    living beings,  
                                        beings living –  
                                                               not humans only,  
                                         but ants & trees  
                                              & the open breeze,  
                                                  things that breathe  
                                                      air or fire,  
                                                         water, earth  
                                       all  kinds of dust  
                                                                & dirt,  
                                                                   particles  
                                        a  part of all,  
                                                            all a part  
                                                                          of  
  Everything  
            that is  
        in everything;  
                                 Thus, it Sings!!!  
                                                      & its song  
                                                                    is Life,  
                                                                       & Life
                                                                                 is!!! …  
  a  seed of Stars,  
                      the dust of Suns  
                                                & Moons  
                                                        rocks & dust  
                                       &  outer smoke  
                                                    in outer space  
  Floating  
        in a bath of timelessness,  
                                           counted, measured  
                                                  numbered  
                                   by some species –  
                                                      others caring not;  
  Science & Mathematics  
                     trying to plot  
                                             Poetry in motion,  
                                                                                Motion  
                                                in a Helix’s curve,  
                                And Life  
                                       on Earth
                                           becomes visible
                                                                  to You
                                         through the naked I!

In the very early morning 
Long before Dawn time 
I lay down in the paddock 
And listened to the cold song of the grass. 
Between my fingers the green blades, 
And the green blades pressed against my body. 
“Who is she leaning so heavily upon me?” 
Sang the grass. 
“Why does she weep on my bosom,
Mingling her tears with the tears of my mystic lover?
Foolish little earth child! 
It is not yet time. 
One day I shall open my bosom 
And you shall slip in—but not weeping. 
Then in the early morning 
Long before Dawn time 
Your lover will lie in the paddock. 
Between his fingers the green blades 
And the green blades pressed against his body . . . 
My song shall not sound cold to him 
In my deep wave he will find the wave of your hair 
In my strong sweet perfume, the perfume of your kisses. 
Long and long he will lie there  . . . 
Laughing—not weeping.”

If I could write a tale to-night,
A tale of thrilling things;
A spice of love, a bit of fight,
The clink of wedding rings,
The villain’s death, and all end right,
If I could write a tale to-night.

My pot is on the fire to-night,
Alas, it needs to boil;
I gaze with would-be seeress sight,
And burn the midnight oil,
Alack, again, I cannot write,
My pot is on the fire to-night.

A check looms large into my sight,
And here, I scribble rhymes;
No editor will heed my plight,
I’ve proved that scores of times:
Oh, hero, gallant, come bedight,
A check looms large into my sight.

I gaze into the fire to-night,
And build my castles there;
Great mansions, tall, and all alight,
Alas, they turn to air.
Then vainly, I for ideas fight,
And gaze into the fire to-night.

It is no use, I cannot write,
I’d rather dream than work;
Then what’s the use, let’s take to-night
For luxury of shirk.
Those editors would send it back,
I cannot write, ah, well, alack!

All young cops have soft
mild eyes. Their upbringing is lavish.
They walk between blueberries and ferns,
rescuing grannies from rising waters.
With the motion of a hand they ask for
a snack from those plastic bags. They
sit down on tree stumps, looking at valleys
and thinking of their moms. But woe is me
if a young one gets mad. A Scourge
of God rings, with a club that later you can
borrow to blot your bare feet.
Every cop wears a cap, his head murmuring under it
A sled rushes down a slope in his dreams.
Whomever he kills, he brings spring to,
whomever he touches has a wound inscribed.
I would give my granny and my
grandpa, my mom and my pa, my wife
and my son to a cop to play with.
He would tie up my granny’s white hair,
but he’d probably chop up my son
on the stump of a tree. The cop himself would be sad
that his toy was broken. That’s the way they are
when smoking pot: melancholy. They take off
their caps and breathe their tears into them.
Actually, they’re like camels riding
in the desert, as if it were the wet palm of a hand.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

I

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
        hills and a cloud.

II

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
"The spring is like a belle undressing."

III

The gold tree is blue,
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

^{translated from the Maltese by Ruth Ward}

I’m a stone but at night I turn into a woman:
A face is born, arms and a pair of legs.
I go forth in the dark, as I need no light to make my way—
which I know well: through the breath
I exhale, inhale; the breath that
moves, moves me, lifts me
to that summit where no one approaches.
I alone can reach this place,
as only I can see it.

Ġebla

Jien ġebla, ’mma billejl ninbidel f’mara:  
jitwieled wiċċ, dirgħajn u par riġlejn; 
nimxi fid-dlam—m’għandix bżonn dawl biex nimxi 
triqti magħrufa minn ġewwa—bin-nifs 
li niġbed, bin-nifs li narmi, bin-nifs 
li jiċċaqlaq, li jċaqlaqni, jeħodni 
lejn dak l-imkien fejn ħadd aktar ma jersaq. 
Jien biss nifhem dal-post għax jien biss nagħrfu.