Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and 
        salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most
        others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's
        mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace
        everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's mind off his
        caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in
        their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere
        that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it
        never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that
        building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy
        and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time
        when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the
        grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is
        stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like
        they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are
        already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could
        look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really
        stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the
        surface of it very little gets said.
        
 There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like.
        Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope --letting them
        come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much
        easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood.
        Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be
        put aside-- costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the
        end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even
        offer to pay.
        
 It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long,
        barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The
        whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you
        could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an
        uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before
        you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the
        wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky.
        Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time
        too--nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny
        Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin'
        to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't
        even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way
        must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they
        could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling
        somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east
        of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment."
        Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting
        in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

From weariness I looked out on the stars
   And there beheld them, fixed in throbbing joy, 
Nor racked by such mad dance of moods as mars
   For us each moment’s grace with swift alloy. 
And as they pierced the heavens’ serene deep
   An envy of that one consummate part
Swept me, who mock. Whether I laugh or weep,
   Some inner silences are at my heart.
Cold shame is mine for all the masks I wear,
   Belying that in me which shines and sings
Before Him, to face down man’s alien stare—
   A graceless puppet on unmeaning strings, 
I that looked out, and saw, and was at rest,
   Stars, and faint wings, rose-etched along the west.

There is something dense, united, settled in the depths,
repeating its number, its identical sign.
How it is noted that stones have touched time,
in their refined matter there is an odor of age,
of water brought by the sea, from salt and sleep.
 
I'm encircled by a single thing, a single movement: 
a mineral weight, a honeyed light
cling to the sound of the word "noche":
the tint of wheat, of ivory, of tears,
things of leather, of wood, of wool,
archaic, faded, uniform,
collect around me like walls.

I work quietly, wheeling over myself,
a crow over death, a crow in mourning.
I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons,
centric, encircled by a silent geometry:
a partial temperature drifts down from the sky,
a distant empire of confused unities
reunites encircling me.

Brightness appears showing us everything
it reveals the splendors it calls everything
but shows it to each of us alone
and only once and only to look at
not to touch or hold in our shadows
what we see is never what we touch
what we take turns out to be something else
what we see that one time departs untouched
while other shadows gather around us
the world’s shadows mingle with our own
we had forgotten them but they know us
they remember us as we always were
they were at home here before the first came
everything will leave us except the shadows
but the shadows carry the whole story
at first daybreak they open their long wings

Where in the church of the mind,
the mind’s sawn down trees,

where hardwood’s stacked up,
quartered and milled where under the nave

the painting is placed,
in the left-hand side aisle,

the viewpoint from which one approaches the altar
do the putti recover us and give us wings?

The figures are over life size,
their heart beats thump through the church

in the direction of the brushstroke,
drift at the edge of fields left to the shape it takes.

Sometimes it’s rain the reach of rain. 
Sometimes it’s purer, less mixed. Jubilance.

I feel it running down the hill in the rain
running so as not to get wet but getting wet. 

Pause to tie my shoelace,
as if, tying it, I might actually pull together—finding it undone.

I hid my heart in a nest of roses,
   Out of the sun’s way, hidden apart;
In a softer bed than the soft white snow’s is,
   Under the roses I hid my heart.
   Why would it sleep not? why should it start,
When never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred?
   What made sleep flutter his wings and part?
Only the song of a secret bird.

Lie still, I said, for the wind’s wing closes,
   And mild leaves muffle the keen sun’s dart;
Life still, for the wind of the warm sea dozes,
   And the wind is unquieter yet than thou art.
   Does a thought in thee still as a thorn’s wound smart?
Does the fang still fret thee of hope deferred?
What bids the lids of thy sleep dispart?
Only the song of a secret bird.

The green land’s name that a charm encloses,
   It never was writ in the traveller’s chart,
And sweet as the fruit on its tree that grows is,
   It never was sold in the merchant’s mart.
   The swallows of dreams through its dim fields dart,
And sleep’s are the tunes in its tree tops heard;
   No hound’s note wakens the wildwood hart,
Only the song of a secret bird.

ENVOI

In the world of dreams I have chosen my part,
   To sleep for a season and hear no word
Of true love’s truth or of light love’s art,
   Only the song of a secret bird.

With dusk’s slow bleed, the scent comes back 

from beyond our gate, sickly-sweetly powdering the yard

and its scattered buckets, chalk, decapitated 

plastic fauna—how all the bright junk 

rushes to the pixelated surface 

in the final minutes before remorse 

douses the world in itself. High-tops on the phone wire

already mortared into silhouettes, like crows.

Roof rat in the plum tree, synching its intricate listening 

with the stop-start taps on my MacBook 

ten feet beneath. Wondering what’s taking us so long

to vanish. Its tail pulses from its rich perch 

with what I thought I had once—a hunger 

so absorbing it becomes, while nothing changes,

its own reward. Some hidden dark

where you could crouch and find a pattern. 

While nothing changes; while the scent of jasmine

flutters and drifts, like sympathy, living for itself.

Born to bees (they follow the deer trails
down to drink from the rivers).

Born to call the dog Houdini—
Hoo! Yo, ’Dini! 

Born to parlay “First yellow leaves
on the ash trees/Cool breeze up
the backside/Spinach to Popeye.”

Born to Draco, low,
or the lights of town, or home,
or cooking fires off along the mesa—
Lost Horizon in a common poem. 

Born to crows’ eyes
the furnace-red of sunrise,
and a country girl, old mosquito bites
up one arm and down the other.

Born to stand and see
as one of the thugs tees up
marbles from my childhood cache
and drives them in bright smithereens
off over the lower town and the harbor. 

/ 

at the edge of the verbena the echium swallows bees in a lavender bath or olfactory wash for these bitters these fingers edged in yellows drift in thyme crushing sprigs under nails along this promenade these lawns this potted fragrance mellow take it in as an order a numeral a douche for the senses an enema florid this clyster now rare, herbage archaic, sediment of suppository, for fodder rough or coarse or other entryways for fibers in this hall an inflation of sideways facing a maker of daydreams shaker of this here bed or chaise lounge or sofa or basement or cottage, let the soles of these shoes splinter so the heels come in contact with dirt direct as a rod from the ground through tendons, cross the body with roots from the base of the bottom of earthen alignments of dust, take it in, balance of penance, attention to breath, anchor of gaze, extend the senses, the bounds of a body, of its practice, of its potential, disintegration of silvering, of a mirror, or a boundary, between subject // object, language // record, active // passive, life form, be it animal // vegetal // mineral, no tin to this here tin, no metals to distinguish in this bath of the senses, waft of my helpless musk, it has filled columns of the study, sat on pillars in the middle of the city, with the stylites, the ascetics, as a hermit or a dweller in these cosmos for reception, fasting for the intertextual, desire for connection, from a lapse of memory, an abstraction, an association of sediment, squatting atop this city, on its rods, as a spiritual practice, reading grids, or leaves, or grounds, or spreads, of cards, or cheeks, mixed fluids my roots all trade / one another amalgam temptation / in this here lavender linguistics / boots full dirt my present my offering 

/ 

I give up touch. My hand holds stems 
         of air, while I remember 
         the long hair I wore 
         as a not-girl child. 

 I give up touch to feel 
         safe in a body. How could I be 
         the girl they saw the man 

         I am? Somewhere beyond language 

we are touching 
only the long hair   

of the cool stream 
meeting the lake   

and I remember   

sky when I look down 
into its surface, my face 
only veil, and below, rocks fish   

my shadow. My pulse. Sun and moon 
         set and rise. Everywhere branches 
         tangle. Mist from the lake 

         catches in my beard. Once a butterfly 
         rested there. The moment I said I’m not 

         a flower, she lifted away 
         and I was all bloom.  

What is our essence and who 
         drinks its nectar? A small god 

         surely lives in my throat 
         a kind of temple. I have fed him flesh 

         from the forest floor 
         and he cradles my eyes 

         and he grows me up 
         into the green 
         of trees. I know 

         he’s gold though he’s only ever been 
         visible in dreams. He appears 

         as my mother, childhood 
         pets, a first love, a ghost 

         story whispered over flashlight 
         in a backyard tent, neighbors 
         whose names I’ve lost.   

Here is where I try to hear him.   

Here is where I study how to love him 

         bring him elderberry, oxeye 
         daisy, row of purple 
         foxglove, leopard 
         slug, mock orange, morning 
         glory, mountain lettuce.   

It rains here often. I learn to be water 
in a garden. A handsome solitude is not the same   

as loneliness. It’s here I call my little gold god   

beloved, friend. 

The shrieks of children
tumbling in the roaring body of the ocean
                 is glee.
But fill me with dread—glee? the ocean? children?
And the hysterical 
           wisteria. That frantic and purple
                      emissary of the encroaching jungle. 
I think the jungle will win, wind—in the end—its tensile vines
around the throats and raised swords of sun scorched monuments,
collapse the flag poles and balustrades, whatever stakes
           are planted there, will charge
the volition of its green abundance, wild against the wild
                     volition of the frothing ocean. Marry it. What children
will march in that conjugal procession with crowns of kelp
                                             and frantic purple flowers?

A silence slipping around like death,
Yet chased by a whisper, a sigh, a breath;
One group of trees, lean, naked and cold,
Inking their cress ’gainst a sky green-gold;
One path that knows where the corn flowers were;
Lonely, apart, unyielding, one fir;
And over it softly leaning down,
One star that I loved ere the fields went brown.

I pry open the files, still packed
        with liquor & strange brine.

Midnight seeps from the cracks
        slow pulp of arithmetic. Four or five

or six at a time, the white men draw
        along the Gordonsville Road, on foot

or on horseback, clustered close—
        each man counting up his hours, the knife

of each man’s tongue at the hinge
        of his own mouth. For ninety-three years

& every time I slip away to read
        those white men line the roadway

secreting themselves in the night air
        feeding & breathing in their private

column. Why belly up to their pay stubs
        scraping my teeth on the chipped flat

of each page? This dim drink only blights me
        but I do it.

^{“I can remember when I was a little, young girl, how my old mammy would sit out of doors in the evenings and look up at the stars and groan, and I would say, ‘Mammy, what makes you groan so?’ And she would say, ‘I am groaning to think of my poor children; they do not know where I be and I don’t know where they be. I look up at the stars and they look up at the stars!’”
            —Sojourner Truth.}

I think I see her sitting bowed and black,
  Stricken and seared with slavery’s mortal scars,
Reft of her children, lonely, anguished, yet
  Still looking at the stars.

Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons,
  Pounding our stubborn hearts on Freedom’s bars,
Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set,
  Still visioning the stars!

The places where Edmonia’s bones were fractured still hold violent reverberations. When it rains I massage the static hum out of each point of impact. There is nothing heavier than flesh that wishes to be on another axis, except perhaps stone she shaped. Tonight she tells me, it’s impossible to bring a lover to the small death she deserves. An orgasm is excavated, never given. She takes my face in her hands without permission. I take her waist with care not to treat her like a healing thing. My fear winnows. She is digging me out of my misery with her fugitive hands. No one has ever led me out of myself the way she does when we move as though the species depends on our pleasure. She makes a pocket of me until I cry. I’ve seen that field, the site of her breaking, in the empty parking lot I cut through to class. There is nothing left for us to forge in Oberlin, and still we remain, Edmonia a sentient rock, swallowing her own feet in want of motion. We fit on this twin sized bed only by entanglement. We survive here by the brine of our brutish blood.

1

One summer night, walking from our house after dinner, stars make the sky almost white.

My awe is like blindness; wonder exchanges for sight.

Star-by-star comprises a multiplicity like thought, but quiet, too dense for any dark planet between.

While single stars are a feature of the horizon at dusk, caught at the edge of the net of gems.

Transparence hanging on its outer connectedness casts occurrence as accretion, filling in, of extravagant, euphoric blooming.

Then, being as spirit and in matter is known, here to there.

I go home and tell my children to come out and look.

The souls of my two children fly up like little birds into branches of the Milky Way,  
chatting with each other, naming constellations, comparing crystals and fire.

They exclaim at similarities between what they see in the sky and on our land.

So, by wonder, they strengthen correspondence between sky and home.

Earth is made from this alchemy of all children, human and animal, combined 
with our deep gratitude. 

2

I see his dark shape, moving and shifting against night’s screen of stars.

My little girl reaches for his lighted silhouette.

Human beings are thought upward and flown through by bright birds.

We believe stars are spirits of very high frequency.

We feel proud our animals come from stars so dense in meaning close to sacrament.

We describe time passing in stories about animals; star movement is named for seasonal migrations of deer, wolf, hummingbird, dolphin, and as animals stars walk among us.

Our snake Olivia, for example, tells me there’s no conflict between humans and rain, because resource is all around us.

A coyote loved night, and he loved to gaze at the stars.

“I noticed one star in Cassiopeia; I talked to her, and each night she grew brighter and closer, and she came to life here, as a corn snake, my friend.”

“She looks like a dancer on tiptoe, stepping around pink star-blossoms surging up after rain.”

3

Constellations are experienced emotionally as this play of self through plant and animal symbols and values.

A dream atmosphere flows; everything represented is sacred; being moves in accord, not of time.

Returning from the Milky Way, she realized crystals had fallen from her bag and looked up.

My story links a journey to sky with the creation of stars, in which place accommodates becoming.

Chama River flows north-south to the horizon, then straight up through the Milky Way, like water moving beneath a riverbed that’s dry.        

Abiquiu Mountain, El Rito Creek, coyote, snake, rainbow and rain, spider and hummingbird identify equivalent spiritual placements above, so wherever we go, there is company, nurture, from every star in our regard.

4

I start up to ask my birds to return home, and find our land continuous with a starry sky mapped as entities who set into motion occurrence, here.

Place awaits an imprint from this potential, even though starlight arriving now already happened; what happens is a depth of field, before and after drought, fire, storm disruption.

I move at high speed, but I’m still standing beside my house in the dark. 

To go there, I find the place on our mesa that correlates to their tree in the sky and leap up.

Space stirs as star trilliums emerge through darkness like humus.

I ask one blossom to please in the future renew these bonds between sky and my children, so they will always hold light in the minerals of their eyes.

5

Sun on its nightly underground journey weaves a black thread between white days on the cosmic loom, cord or resonance between new experience and meaning.

The origin of stars expresses the underlying warp of this fabric; summer solstice draws a diagonal across my floor, precession, weaving ground of informing spirit, so therefore, life is fundamental to stars.

The reverse is well known.

That’s why I don’t use a telescope, star charts or glasses when I go out; I think of a place; I wait, then fly to my children.

When the star-gate is raised, there’s a narrow door between sky and ground.

But when I arrive, I find the sky solid; I can’t break through to visit my starbirds and stand there wondering, before dawn.

Then sky vault lifts; maybe I can slip through to find the Milky Way and see its blossoms.

Then our sun appears in the crack and pushes through to the day.

It’s so bright, so hot, I step back and cover my eyes; I hear my mother calling.

Wieners
Canned fruit
Crackers
Soluble coffee
Milk powder
Granulated sugar
Tin of jam
Cookie sandwich
Fudge
or
Radish Soup
Birthday Seaweed Soup
Pan-fried Spam with kimchi
Strictly lard
so
What did General Fatty eat?