| Contents
August-December
Luck.............................................................3
Just South of the Kingdom........................................5
Spoils, Dividing.................................................7
Words of Love...................................................10
The Point of the Lambs..........................................13
A Force, and Would Consume Us...................................17
Roman Glass.....................................................20
This, the Pattern...............................................23
Stagger.........................................................25
Medallion.......................................................27
Regalia Figure..................................................30
Strung Absentia.................................................33
Recumbent.......................................................37
Lustrum.........................................................40
January-May
For the Falconer................................................45
Tether..........................................................48
Preamble........................................................51
Chamber Music...................................................53
Little Dance Outside the Ruins of Unreason......................55
The Lost Chorus.................................................58
The Pinnacle....................................................61
Familiar........................................................66
Chosen Figure...................................................69
Caravan.........................................................71
Safari Figure...................................................73
Yours, and the Room After.......................................75
The Figure, the Boundary, the Light.............................77
Revision........................................................79
Acknowledgments.....................................................83
Chapter One
LUCK
What we shall not perhaps get over, we
do get past, until—innocent,
with art for once
not in mind, How did I get here,
we ask one day, our gaze
relinquishing one space for the next
in which, not far from where
in the uncut grass we're sitting
four men arc the unsaid
between them with the thrown
shoes of horses, luck briefly as a thing
of heft made to shape through
air a path invisible, but there ...
Because we are flesh, because
who doesn't, some way, require touch,
it is the unsubstantial—that which can
neither know touch nor be known
by it—that most bewilders,
even if the four men at
play, if asked, presumably,
would not say so, any more
than would the fifth man, busy
mowing the field's far
edge, behind me,
his slow, relentless pace promising
long hours before the sorrow
of seeing him go and,
later still, the sorrow
going, until eventually the difficulty
only is this: there was some.
JUST SOUTH OF THE KINGDOM
It is for, you see, eventually the deer to
take it, the fruit
hangs there. Meanwhile, they
graze with the kind
of idleness that suggests
both can be true: to see—and seem
not to—the possible danger of
us watching;
to notice, and to also
be indifferent to the certain
plunder of, between them
and us, the lone
tree, thick with apples the deer have
only to nose
up against,
what's ripe will fall, will
become theirs.
—A breeze, slightly—
in which, if nobody, nothing moves,
nevertheless when it comes to
waiting it is useless,
understand, to think the deer
won't outlast us. They have,
as do all animals before the getting
tamed, a patience that
comes from the expectation of,
routinely, some hungering.
Ourselves, we are bored easily:
how much time can
be left before—as toward, say,
an impossible suitor whom already
we've kept long enough
baying—we'll turn away, and
begin the life I've heard tell of?
The light is less, there. One of us
has betrayed the other.
SPOILS, DIVIDING
Thank you for asking—
yes, I have thought on the soul,
I have decided
it should not be faulted for
its indifference: that is as it
must be.
How blame
the lantern whose limits
always are only the light of
itself, casting the light
out?
That the body enjoys
some moment
in that light, I regard
as privilege.
Say what
you will.
The hawk's shadow
darkening
the zeroed-in-upon prey,
the victim
classically becoming
quite still—
It is very
like that. Having
understood which, I admit to
—also—the body as mere
story
whose ending,
like the story itself, is
small—how
not to think, for a time, that it
is not finished,
though it
is finished—
The ending was always this one.
Prediction,
gift,
science.
What shines now doesn't, won't
in our lifetime
stop shining—
no.
I turned away.
WORDS OF LOVE
Don't.
When I point
out to you that
the flat face of the lake's water in
stillness is made suddenly
more striking for how a wind
just now, coming, spoils it,
I have in mind
only how even a least
disturbance, strangely
heightening a thing's
beauty, can at last
define it. Don't
go, I mean,
possibly. If I have
described us
as a reasonable but flawed kind
of proof of
some fact that I keep
forgetting, I might have
added that not
only do I respect, I
require mystery.
Less and less
am I one of those who believes
To know a thing,
first you touch it
—as among the blind, or
as among such as are
more inclined than
ourselves, lately, to living on
life's reportedly still perilous, still
exhilarating
edge. Ourselves
exhausted,
even as a child's body, sometimes, will
fall toward sleep out of sheer
waiting,
uncertainty,
how will the story end?
There was, one time, a stag ...
And now there isn't,
is there?
And no, he won't come,
ever, back. This is the widening, but
not unbeautiful wake of his having
left us, and this
is the light—
true,
exotic,
faded slightly—in which
much, still, is possible:
Don't promise—
Don't forget—
THE POINT OF THE LAMBS
"The good lambs
in the yellow barn—the rest
housed in blue." By
"the rest," meaning those who
—the guide explained—inevitably
arrive suffering. "For
some do," he added.
Soft.
Serious. This—like
a new lesson. As to
some among us, it was,
it seemed. The usual
stammer of heart the naïve
tend to, in the face of what finally
is only the world. What
must it be, to pass
thus—clean, stripped—
through a life? What
reluctance the mind
shows on recognizing
that what it approaches
is, at last, the answer
to the very question it knows
now, but
too late,
oh better to never to have never
put forward. What I
mean is we moved
closer,
in,
to the blue barn's
advertisement—
flaw,
weakness. We
looked in.
Three days, four days
old. Few expected to
finish the evening it was beginning to
be already. And the small
crowd of us
shifting forward, and—
in our shifting uniformly—it
being possible to see how between
us and any
field rendered by a sudden wind
single gesture—kowtow,
upheaval—there was
little difference. Some
took photographs; most
did a stranger thing: touched
briefly, without
distinction, whichever
person stood immediately in
front of, next to. Less
for support than
as remedy or proof or
maybe—given the lambs who
besides dying, were as well
filthy (disease,
waste and, negotiating
the dwindling contract
between the two,
the flies everywhere)—
maybe the touching
concerned curbing the hand's instinct
to follow the eye, to
confirm vision. Who can
say? I was there—yes—but
I myself touched no one.
A FORCE, AND WOULD CONSUME US
Because the lawn is not ours, I can
mind less
its destruction—
the pale grubs that become daily
more legion; and, tearing
at them,
the shimmering consequence of crows,
stiff chorus, each cast in the special
black
of bad news—only, always, what
is it? Until that, too, not
mattering: winter soon,
and you—
and I—
We'll have left here,
changed presumably, to guess
from the steady
coming of us both to wanting, differently,
the body. Still, I want it
with you, steadfastness remains
one of my two gifts, the other
less gift, perhaps, than simply a matter
of I can't help it,
namely a knack for making anything
mean something.
You will have seen what
that leads to. Last night,
it was the train shedding town the way
every night it does, but
also, this time, like
answer: how easily can grow
routine even the chance any
train equals—Now
go Now return How could I
not wake you?
For reasons possibly not yours,
I want the sunset that
you want.
Of heroes,
what I most remember is
that gesture—in
defeat, victory, the same—that
each comes to:
regards, as if for the first time, his own hands.
Mutters, or is silent.
Translations are various: God,
If not for, If only—
Look what I've done.
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THE TETHER