For generations they lived like this. Wanting badly to save us—not knowing how. & all the while we found love in unlikely places: In the ravaged church of our bodies & our faces, refracted in their long faces.

it is not, so much, your image I miss. But neither the farmer nor his wife nor you, Blackbird, came to restore me. So come, hail & damnation. Come, anyone. Come, wind. When the crows descended, I welcomed them.

                                                                            How well you understand that fathoming the past is another miraculous way                                                                            of lacing fingers with the sea.

The first summer after you left rolled in as a white & fine-grained fog. The question became not: Where had you gone--but one of location, nevertheless, behind what curtain

Which is something Ovid understood: How wheat rising from a field may, in a single day, take on the form of brothers who love—& yet by dusk, turn their swords on each other. Or how by the deception of dreams one kingdom falls & all the time in the world is lost—

Night has its own reality, apart from day. Which is why poetry is the science of dusks & dawns.

How well you understand there is no loss like looking back on the city you              loved as even now you are leaving it. How well you understand that fathoming the past is another miraculous way                                                                            of lacing fingers with the sea.

There must be a thousand ways to remake the past, which is why poetry is the science of opposites.