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Brilliance that blackens, that casts a dust shadow, that opens and shuts like an eye.

Heat that sings, that quiets, that's single and plural, conflagration and candle flame.

Body-spirit-mind edgeless, morphous, no more container than contained.

Red-tongued and panting, draped in the trees, a roar waits in its purr like a mine.

of minute barbed legs, fiddle bow to fiddle. No movement on the pond surface— water slurring its beaded lining, blunted tapestry

of black and blacker, brown and tan. No talking on the part of two dogs engaged in chase and turn, alike under coats

wet dun and spotted damp, the heart's steady hiccough under layers of fascia, muscle, rib. Hands spill the pond water. Nothing can be grasped.

Why inedible hunger? Why insatiable need?

We walk a yard apart, talking of literature and of botany. We have known each other, remotely, for nineteen years.

Once when my coat was too thin, and one torn pocket was all I had left of a great love, I found a blue canto that calmed me. A pine tree was in it, and crows. In my head: one ant after another, carrying its burden. Art sometimes can enter through a sliver. Give it a broken fence, it will trellis over. Once, when no one was near, a split tree calmed me, and a crow’s cry tore the air, and my ear found an oar, and I rowed.

I’ll let the sun singe the peach, my flesh, luxurious, ruined.

Let rain have its way with me so I can feel my mother’s washcloth

on my face, hand I turned from. Lord, soften the hard pit of my heart.

Excuse me, grass, for keeping you in the dark while I lie here

considering what I will, and will not say.

several sizes too big. It hung on me like a mother’s dress. Even now,

as we speak, I am stitching a darkness you’ll need to unravel,

unraveling another you’ll need to restitch. What can I give you

that you can keep? Once you asked, Does the sky stop? It doesn’t stop,

it just stops being one thing and starts being another.

Sometimes we hold hands and tip our heads way back

so the blue fills our whole field of vision, so we feel like

we’re in it. We don’t stop, we just stop being what we are

and start being what? Where? What can I give you

to carry there? These shadows of leaves—the lace in solace?

This soft, hand-me-down darkness? What can I give you

that will be of use in your next life, the one you will live without me?

I want to take the blue like it’s something. Today the most beautiful blue ever. The fullest range of shades I want to list them. Blue alone a rainbow.

On the third day, gone the smoke to breathe from, gone the black funnel to a hovering like a swarm; a net, perhaps, of a yellowing black that makes me think of someone dead, so, perhaps, the flag of corpse.

Today no interference. You can keep looking up the blue.

Only across town the still-fresh smell, guttural blue.

their day bodies common beetles. In a planetarium of the mind sparks lit

when logic has gone down faint in the dawn of intellect. Instinct

makes luminous the insect. Idea's anonymous ordinary mark, that cryptic

in daylight crept, can rise an asterisk astonishing others out. If the secret of the dark

be kept, an eagerness in smallest, fiercest hints can scintillate.

beneath the stars in the meadowy clearing around the pond

I try to scatter the sparks of my desire, every taste

each touch and trace even the faintest fragrance of my wanting you

But who would chasten the fires of desire must swim, come morning

in a weedy pond, as I do now having left behind my rings, my clothes

the house just now waking in the welter of bird cry Must turn aside from

the weeping beech lichen gray in the mist Must ignore the sun

burning off the mist that conceals the one bright pearl I'm after

Must forget I'm and after pearl and goal And go where light is

Around me like silk, like silt the pond opens and closes and I swim in circles

my fingertips brushing frogbit, bottom sedge and waterweed

Breath by breath I take on the life of the old muddy bass who outwits

all the sharp hooks that have dangled before it even the tiniest of enticements

And yes, smiling at this fine conceit, taking refuge as it fades into water and ripple

into the bubbles of my breath Until, exhausted, I flip over on my back, floating now

into a scented commonwealth of pond lilies—astonished to see high overhead

a pond of sky, invisible fathoms measureless air that only seems to be rimmed

by the billowy crowns of the oaks that edge the clearing

Whatever once I wanted whatever once I was is now just

this unguarded light, without beginning or end As it floats

in me, I float in it so empty, nacreous, and bright I cannot tell in which

pond above or pond below not one, not two there are floating now

tip-to-tip attached two green dragonflies taking their full ease.

flinging hail even as lightning printed out its sizzling unreadable language followed by truly terrible laughter.

But, no. Maybe it wasn’t laughter but a reminder we need— seemingly something to do with power.

What could it be? What could it be? What do you think it could be?

For a few hours, the sail fills on toward infinity. Shadows of our delicate bodies ebb and flow across the deck of our delicate boat.

What if the beautiful days, the good and pacific temperate moments, weren't just lovely, but everything? What if I could let it fall away in the wake, that ache to extract meaning from vastness?

Let this suffice; the ease of thinking it all goes on, whether we're here to see it or not. The splashing waves, the suntipped gulls arcing across the radiant world.

In the wind that lifts the harbor litter Wet against my fingers in a dream Salvaging among the tideline's bitter gleanings Generous Exigent Lush and lean

Your voice A tune I thought I had forgotten The taste of cold July brook on my tongue A fire built on thick ice in the winter The place where lost and salvaged meet and fit The cadences a class in grief is taught in The sound when frozen rivers start to run

candelabra for the dead, will prepare her words for the great distance,

arranging them like passengers. She hopes that life is a thing

she can slice open at the round, hopes that it is fleshy and sweet.

The eager foxes nod to one another. The cicadas have sung their skins

cleanly open under a sun as dry and polished as a fossil.