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Everyone here is doing this, filling carts with small comforts while somewhere a child goes to bed hungry, while the earth heats, while men make decisions about who gets to live.

I know what this is, this careful arranging while everything collapses. This is how we survive. And also how we disappear.

Will be dust as well You may say It will say as well to you When you ponder

Fruit upon branches Delaying the end Trellises and semblances Meeting meant-to-be Seams and angles

Repeating what it is worth To forget another hour Lose oneself in a labyrinth Devoid of a minotaur

What door never opened Opens once and for all If only you find A flaw hidden in the design Disclosing a moment

Time’s timeless print Gone now Here tomorrow Deer at the edge of a wood Turning still

"Nothing lasts"— a promise also of consolation.

Grief and hope the skipping rope's two ends, twin daughters of impatience.

One wears a dress of wool, the other cotton.

A fish drifting upside down. Slow accordions sweeten the breeze.

The Sanitary Mattress Factory says, "Sleep Is Life." Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?

Yesterday someone said, "It gets late so early." I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it. Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.

She can’t see her feet even though she is walking on them, sinking in mud so soft it could be cake batter. She both likes and doesn’t like how it squeezes through her toes as she feels her way into the water.

Past the rope, she keeps losing parts of herself, her calves, her thighs, her hands, her shoulders, the blue stripes on the swimsuit her mother sewed for her.

Unlike the community pool, where she can hunt for pennies with her eyes open, the lake closes around her; if she opens her eyes, it’s what she imagines a dust storm to be, a thick, dark brown.

Smells brown, too, like damp dirt mixed with fish guts; earthy, elemental, reptilian, how it was before God created dry land, a dark taste, like a secret room closed up for centuries. Halfway across, she pulls herself onto a rock, closes her eyes, feels her skin evaporate. When she slithers off, disappearing into the lake, she leaves a dark imprint.

I.

Instead, I conjure rivers, the glide of the Susquehanna, a heron unblinking on shore, the whole length of me amber and slippery in the turning river, just one more ripple— the Mississippi at Red Wing, broad and generous, a promise— and the Nile, the alluvial Nile, in the delta a lotus unfolding. Just now, I stretch out in a river of salt and summer phosphorus that kindles wet flesh, our flesh, to a wander of fire in dark water. We glide into night so absolute we barely surface, length of me against length of you. We travel great distances together, letting our breath out slow.

II.

Remembering old lovers, I lean into the lake, an interval of water, a swing of sun— by afternoon a surface so still and clean and dark that clouds and the sun too bright to see reflect more clearly there. There I skim into clouds where lily and arrowhead root, where sun is moon. I am is where I'm not. Night deepens and fills past its threshold of stars and spills beyond the far and near horizons of my skin— such spaciousness in standstill and dissolution that I feel quick and light.

Looking out on the Connecticut River with its slow push between tobacco fields, you feel a wind from recent volcanoes arrive.

It's been telling you all along what will happen. Within this wind a helicopter grumbles, the sky gets torn.

Still, a spray of goldfinches gilds the shaken trees.

Tonight, despite heat and sweeping rains, nothing unties the birds from their shadows.

In Holyoke, men and women sit on their cooling steps. Guns shine in the dark. Upstairs

beside television-noise, one baby's night sweat breaks. Birds tuck up beneath wet leaves.

In the far-off forest, a vixen stretches awake.

Restless, you step out, touch the mildewed leaves of phlox. Lavender and pink

their blossoms brighten the evening damp.

and already hidden behind patches of floating leaves, a compression of landscape, projection of depth and height in one dimension, that appears, lasting a couple of hours.

In the mirrored image we see clouds drifting on the same level as the rock, until suddenly a gust of wind glides over the water's surface

and gives the mirror an existence of its own -matter now, opaque murmur. And there remains only sky, water, pebbles.

It is coming in waves whooshing through the trees. Silvery, intimate, it softens and washes the parched air.

It falls on my face like a blessing. It sweetens my body rolling down my upstretched arms.

The rain blesses us as it opens the cracked earth as it opens us to itself: the sweet gush of August rain.

Even at noon the house is dark. In my room under the eaves I hear the steady benevolence of water washing dust raised by the haying from porch and car and garden and purified, as if tonsured.

The grass resolves to grow again, receiving the rain to that end, but my disordered soul thirsts after something it cannot name.

All my life I’ve wanted to be the high soprano, summer’s voice warbling in the tree’s crown,

not the mezzo’s darker singing in the air just below. Some things can’t be helped. That snow comes early.

That difficulties arrive in any weather, time passes. Bach, knowing this, tuned his keyboard to make

pleasure from leaning into dissonance, then leaning away, the shape of sorrow relived, sorrow relieved.

Tomorrow on the pavement, Lord, Let me remember wheatfields, When sultry walls confront me Let me be aware Of space that harbors gratefully Sun and yellow butterflies, And the smell of mellilotis On a country air.

I slept there in the yellow house under a blood-red quilt; the colours hissed like metal in a mould; I even flayed a frog, held it to the great light of the Midi for the intravenous lilt of the blood.

Some would have painted the sun purple-black as a plum, a fireball in the mouth of a corpse; or like Pentecostal flame, dragonsblood, one glaze bleeding into another.

I whipped it until it cartwheeled like a sunflower red on yellow splashing the wheatfield scarlet, pale sulphur, a falcon with a flail over its shoulder.

But last night I dreamt of irradiating all the colours at once— as if the sun climbed both sides of the canvas— and in the silence before the blaze

the high white note of birds igniting in mid-air.