—For Leia and Graham

Before he is sick, he surfs the Pacific.
After he is sick, his faint body is pulled
from the water just in time to know
something is expanding. Leia goes over.
Just as friends, she says.
She sleeps in his bed, makes coffee,
tackles the wild zinnias of the Santa Barbara
hills, bends the flora to her spells.
The brain controls everything
except his nearly lifeless foot
moving to a Steely Dan cover.

All his orchids are crooked in the greenhouse
and the cats are missing. Too many coyotes,
he once said. When he was well,
everything survived. The orchids grew
erect, the coyotes were spineless, and Leia
stitched things together on her porch
exactly half a mile from the ocean.
Does anyone ever die in California,
I wonder. Leia enshrines him with eucalyptus
and Neruda, calls us, sleeps fetal now in LA.
You want to hear a love story, someone says.
Meaning them. Meaning this thing,
not quite knowable to us, her hand
on his laughing foot, the only part still alive,
it seems, the contract of their intimacy
that is not quite love, not quite
anything we’ve seen or can name.

I climbed a mountain and the air constricted breathing—
the terrain of the free spirit, that creature
so dedicated to surmounting that the mountain,
its hanging glacier, its granite slabs cut through
by the trail, its heaps of rocks blocking reasonable
access to the turquoise lake beneath, its wildflowers
with their fraying lackadaisical paintbrushes,
went by in my eyes so quickly I never truly left
the not-yet-turning aspens, carved by local lovers
who loved themselves so much they stayed right
there with their knives until they finished their names.

             I

     Beneath the vine-clad eaves,
         Whose shadows fall before
         Thy lowly cottage door
     Under the lilac’s tremulous leaves—
     Within thy snowy claspeed hand
         The purple flowers it bore..
     Last eve in dreams, I saw thee stand,
     Like queenly nymphs from Fairy-land—
     Enchantress of the flowery wand,
         Most beauteous Isadore!

              II

     And when I bade the dream
         Upon thy spirit flee,
         Thy violet eyes to me
     Upturned, did overflowing seem
     With the deep, untold delight
         Of Love’s serenity;
     Thy classic brow, like lilies white
     And pale as the Imperial Night
     Upon her throne, with stars bedight,
         Enthralled my soul to thee!

                 III

     Ah I ever I behold
         Thy dreamy, passionate eyes,
         Blue as the languid skies

     Hung with the sunset’s fringe of gold;
     Now strangely clear thine image grows,
         And olden memories
     Are startled from their long repose
     Like shadows on the silent snows
     When suddenly the night-wind blows
         Where quiet moonlight ties.

              IV

     Like music heard in dreams,
         Like strains of harps unknown,
         Of birds forever flown
     Audible as the voice of streams
     That murmur in some leafy dell,
         I hear thy gentlest tone,
     And Silence cometh with her spell
     Like that which on my tongue doth dwell,
     When tremulous in dreams I tell
         My love to thee alone!

              V

     In every valley heard,
         Floating from tree to tree,
         Less beautiful to, me,
     The music of the radiant bird,
     Than artless accents such as thine
         Whose echoes never flee!
     Ah! how for thy sweet voice I pine:—
     For uttered in thy tones benign
     (Enchantress!) this rude name of mine

         Doth seem a melody!

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

The world below the brine,   
Forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves,   
Sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, the thick tangle, openings, and pink turf,   
Different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white, and gold, the play of light through the water,   
Dumb swimmers there among the rocks,coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers,
Sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,   
The sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes,   
The leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the sting-ray,   
Passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do,
The change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere,
The change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

In the round little window, everything is blue,
land bluish, blue-green, blue
				(and sky)
	everything is blue
blue lakes and lagoons
			blue volcanoes
while farther off the land looks bluer
	blue islands in a blue lake.
This is the face of the land liberated.
And where all the people fought, I think:
						for love!
To live without the hatred
				of exploitation.
To love one another in a beautiful land
so beautiful, not only in itself
			but because of the people in it,
above all because of the people in it.
That's why God gave us this beautiful land
for the society in it.
And in all those blue places they fought, suffered
			for a society of love
				here in this land.

One patch of blue looks more intense...
And I thought I was seeing the sites of all the battles there,
and of all the deaths,
behind that small, round windowpane
						blue
					all the shades of blue.