As hollow as a gutted fish, a hole in the sand,
a cistern cracked along the seam—

There is no filling such emptiness. And yet—

Stitch it shut. Pour and pour, if you wish. Wish and wish, but it’s wasted—
Water carried to the garden in your cupped palms.

Might as well seal an ember in a wax jar. Kindle fire on the crest of a wave.

Unbloom a poppy, reshut its mouth, unred its lips—
As if it hadn’t already sung,

As if its voice hadn’t already set all summer singing.

And the gall at its throat, the boil it’s prized for,
Hadn’t been cut and bled of its white sleep.

As if a child could be folded, resewn in its sac, and returned to its womb.

Nothing better to do than watch
each drop of Cytoxan shimmy

down a see-through tube
to anoint the chosen vein.

You could turn to the window’s maple,
smoldering in autumn sun,

to catch the precise nanosecond
when leaf detaches from limb—

stare down a likely candidate,
curled and tinged with brown.

A nudge from the wind
might encourage the scene along,

but even then, if the angle of light
isn’t just so, you’d miss

the shadow of falling leaf many yards
beyond the trunk, hitting asphalt

and racing toward its embodied self.
When leaf touches ground,

does its shadow ascend?
In these shortened days of fall,

I look for signs of renewal.
Look how the sun flares

bonfire orange and gold
as it clings to the west. Listen!

Can you still hear the freight train’s
burst of horn displacing the air,

after the last boxcar
slinks behind the farthest hill?

Do only laws of physics apply?
In old movie frames, I see my mother’s

young face, gardenia-pale
against dark curls. She is waving,

climbing terraced steps to a lake.
I reverse the reel at will,

my mother backing down
the stairs, then floating up again.

For Stella

I dreamt we were already there.
Some things were right
and some were not.

And somehow Tuesday
was Wednesday
was Monday again.

I slept then woke
and then fell asleep again
and when I slept again

I dreamt we were already there.
Things were right some
and were some not.

My father died yesterday, she said.
Yesterday, some things were and.
Today some are not.

It’s been years, now, since she left and even
still he sleeps on just half the bed. After all,

it really is easier to make that way, quicker
to hide all evidence of dreaming, like souvenirs

hastily put back up on the shelf. He has become
the tenant of fractioned closets, of half-portioned

recipes, of refracted light. He sometimes tells
himself, like time, there is managing in measure,

absence held in the handspan, the half heart,
the hair’s breadth. For comfort, he remembers

seeing the great Dutch paintings—Dou, sometimes
Vermeer—the immeasurable lives made so nearly

bearable in the frame, slightness like a bird’s
body in a plastic bag. As a child, he used to

count miles on telephone poles while, in front,
his parents spoke in weather-leveled voices.

When he’d told her this she pitied him. When
he would add up all the countries he wanted to

show her, she’d tell him that numbers are such
a man’s way of holding the world, but, when

women love, they love innumerably. Softly,
he’d said he only wanted to hold her. He’d never

admit how, against her body, he felt so desperately
proportionate, how sometimes he would lie

along the bathroom tiles as though the seams
and scale would make him somehow bearable

as a painting, would hold him. Not because
he needed holding, but maybe just to know loss

could be traveled, as he watched planes scrawl
across the unbound blue through the window.

So often, these days, he thinks of grief in terms
of distance. Carefully plotting out the lengths

involved in the longing, he imagines himself some
ancient philosopher slowly dividing the distance

toward home, thinking of a child’s hands, still
sticky with the juice of a poorly sectioned fruit.

How impossibly small it all can seem, small
like distance, halved, and halved, and halved again.

To understand what it would be like
          to remove my clothes
as painters do in portraits of themselves

          I imagine I’m the woman
who knows her body
          no longer belongs to the young artist

who painted herself before she had children,
          before her topography was changed
by forces erosive as water and wind,

          and yet she goes on painting it,
the girdle of her earth that is now an etched terrain
          crossed with silver rivulets.

And hills, I want to say to her.
          Valleys. Then hummocks,
hot springs, hoodoo. What is art about

          if not depression? Uplift? Depression
again? At which she straightens
          the flesh of her shoulders and neck

to face me before I disappear
          into landscape,
my favorite state of undress.

Don’t be foolish. No, be foolish.
Each of these trees was once a seed.

Look down the road till it’s all mist and fumes:
Of course your journey is impossible.

It’s stupidly hot for September and yet here’s
an eddy, a gust, something to stir you

as the high leaves of the walnut are stirred,
as fine droplets touch you, touch the table

and the deck, no explanation, no design.
And beauty is like God, mystery

in plain sight, silent, hesitating
in leaves and the shadows of leaves,

in the carved fish painted and nailed
to the railing, in skeins of cloud

and searching fly and pale blue
scrim of sky and seas of emptiness

and dazzle, fusion and spin,
fire and oblivion and all that lies

on the other side of oblivion.

What was done was done
in our names; we ourselves

would never have done
what was done to anyone.

We wanted to be good,
polite, obedient, fun,

wanted only not to ever
ask What have we done?

And yet, in our names,
what was done was done.

Soft as a Claude painting, the yellow sky tonight—
trees in the parking lot still thick, though the air, yes,
has an edge, the honey was solid in the jar
when I opened it this morning, found a single ant
frozen in the dunes, stunned by sweetness.
Can you really die of sweetness? Hard
to say yes, though I want to, looking up at these clouds
that make my heart jump: oh joy in seeing
though I can’t touch, like the girl repeating persimmon
as the waitress in the diner tells her about a tree
at the top of the hill she used to see, how beautiful
that vivid orange fruit was all at once.
Can’t touch them, but I see them in her eyes as
she remembers persimmons. Maybe that was
my mistake: thinking every love was different, a fruit
inside its own clear mason jar—my love, her love, his,
all separate as the trees they fell from. Maybe love
is more contagion, bubbles in a bathtub slowly
swelling, all the little circles drifting, gliding
gently into each other until they burst, until
nothing’s left but foam, the sound of rushing water.

Then there’s crush hour, which comes and goes
on quieter tires. Again the traffic slows
as residential streets congest with Fords
the same age as their drivers, rolling towards
houses they will pointedly roll by.
Their low beams are embarrassing the sky.
The orangina sun has ducked behind
a middle school, and will come out to blind
only the girl so perfectly obsessed
she can’t wait ten more minutes to go west.
And there she goes. Dissolve to white.
This is the last crush hour. Tomorrow night
they’ll all be upstairs, screen-lit in their beds,
pursuing crushes into comment threads,
while outside in the heat, the straggling traffic
dwindles to a single demographic:
their fathers, who could drive these streets asleep,
who do, who all have rendezvous to keep
with houses they don’t live in anymore,
who roll by in the low gears, watching for
the bedroom light that isn’t coming on,
the mother-shape descending to the lawn
to call the child home who isn’t gone.

Or sometimes watched drifting with the leaves,
some last confetti of yellow or brown. Or it existed

the way the juncos huddled beneath the thistle
feeder in winter, in the way the clouds spilled water

in May to soak the ground. Once we found it
in the attic in a steamer trunk, and another time

we closed it in a suitcase and drove it across
the countryside to Ohio. And often we imagined that

the years were a locked door against which
we kept knocking to be admitted. And on the dresser

of the new house, I spilled the change of the marriage
into a heap, and later we sat on the back porch and watched

the nuptial clouds on their conveyor belts. And we slept
at night with the breaths of the marriage around us.

I jumped against the sky expecting I would find another sky. A subtlety to sky.
I wanted to get to know the sky better. I wanted to breathe in the air. The sky as a blank space.
Or maybe the opening to a decent conversation.
If you’re using a camera you can pose against the sky and people will think that you’re flying.
Which is very dishonest.
Particularly to the sky.
Have you known a sky? I am trying to make its acquaintance.
The sky I am thinking of is a set piece for honesty.

Look into the night sky. All it is is confused.
The sky is revealing to the people what a sky can really look like.
Not day. Not the sky that’s being suspended over the whole state of Texas.
Just estranged populations.
So many populations running away from the earth.
I don’t know what to do about a sky when it’s like this.

I am more a middle of the day. My favorite meal is lunch.
My favorite tree is whatever it is that is happening in the spring, mainly after a strong rain.
Maybe sometimes when the leaves change.
So long as the place I’m living in is conducive to trees.
Their weights and measurements. Their various relationships with a sky.
Is there a place where birds come from? I think it’s the sky.
A tree absorbs sky. It takes it into its lungs.
How sky is sky? say the trees. And that seems to mean something.

I built a house, and I made sure there was one window.
I nailed a tether to the side of that window. On the outside, I put sky.
I was jumping to the outside so many times I forgot what falling is in a sky.
I am coming for you, Sky!
Do not misinform me or take me into account. I was attached to this house for a reason.
Sometimes I jump, and I am air.
Then I am sky.
I think, “And, now, everything else!” Where everything else is the order of sky.
Air molecules. Air molecules existing. All they can do is keep existing.

The closer to the torso, the better.
Endangered: fingers in a point,

nosetips, every blooded sword,
the knife’s ricasso, the cupid’s bow of lips,

a Roman nose, the dog’s upturned gaze,
the placid expression, the fierce.

Toes hidden beneath sandals fare better:
Every mother knows this.

Somewhere, a breeze so strong
it stirs the stone robe’s folds.

Imperial porphyry: Understand
that of the most beautiful things, there is less.

Even the music of the lyre broken away.
Don’t touch goes without saying.

The gaze of the guard is never returned.
Out in the courtyard, another wedding ends.

A boy shies from a hand to the shoulder
but will pose by the lion mauling the horse.

Once there were angel wings,
a baby held aloft. If halos, what halos.

A statue may give up a head so the rest survives.
Even the satyrs must have a rest.

have retired now that the circus
has closed, to their watercolors
& bowling leagues, their tusk-dug
rose gardens, their record collections,
their calligraphy—
                             say one has
begun a letter to you, peacock feather
gripped in the beautiful gray coils
of its trunk, & she dips it in the inkwell
& begins
              darling, I have my dead &
I have let them go,

as the elephants walk thirty kilometers
to find the house of their keeper
who died last night, to keep a vigil,
an honor guard of fifteen-thousand-pound
bodies, they wait all night,

as she continues, the past is always
vanishing if we are good or careful,

as the elephants nurse their young,
wrap their trunks when they greet each other,
trumpet when they hear Miles’s Kind of Blue,

what is eternity but the shadows
of everyone who has ever fallen,

the languages of the dead are never more
than a breath away, darling,

as the elephants are drawn & painted
by da Vinci, by Max Ernst,
are reincarnated as Buddha,

our mouths are incapable,
white violets cover the earth,

remember the gates of Rome, linger
near pianos, near the bones & tusks of their own,

the greatest of the shadows are passing
from the earth, there was never a city brighter
than a burn pile of tusks.

name is a windy thing
quiet down a hall

                            leaks through hinges

does it want to be caught?

I don’t know, tipped fangs, fire-points—
                                        want to be caught?

I think people bundle a name with them from place to place

in a basement, a bottle

of wind

a bottle of turn-it-over

I have so much holler in me

At the Standard they pay a man to lathe olive wood
into the softball-sized spheres they load the braziers with

in the heat of early afternoon. They douse them with gas, touch
a match: and the guests with their crow faces

and sky-colored suits emerge
to sip from tiny eggshell glasses.

Orchids lean out from jute baskets lashed
to the palm trunks, lit from below they flutter

like moths—undesperate, and the guests
look exactly the same age, their fingertips linger

on each other’s forearms as they form tender
careless sentences, which diffuse,

and though even their shivers are languorous, delicious, Eugenio says
you can tell from the way they dip

the big shrimps in green sauce and nibble
the creamy meat down, an inch at a time

that they never have sex;
and if I observe how they let their napkins drop

on the gravel, how they drift down the path to dinner
I’ll know who has just recognized himself in a stranger,

calmly; whose torso is squeezed by a wordless joy;
who feels like a child; who a cloud;

and who aches, as she steps back onto the cool tiles of the arcade
in thin sandals, to be broken down again,

annihilated, into a thinking rubble.