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She's busy giving away wild animals to reluctant guests. I agree to take a snake-dog,

maybe an electric eel, but when I feel its sharp teeth in my shoulder,

I start to worry about the future welfare of our fragile cat, the precarious order of our rented home,

and remember I am supposed to be looking for someone…. A half-wolf, half-elephant

cracks through the walls of the peeling wallpapered bedroom

where my former student in a fuschia robe and curlers sits by a lighted make-up mirror.

The shadows off elongated fake eyelashes are as dark as the branches of an evening tree.

The hovering body of a fiery sparrow is almost transparent,

like flute music or an idea.

I turn my back and finally, I spot her my friend, the host.

She's sipping rum punch from a martini glass; her whole body appears to be smiling, glowing,

and I don't know what to think.

I know she doesn't drink, hasn't in decades, and I wonder what's suddenly changed, but then I remember

the cancer won, my friend isn't actually here, there is no party, there was never a house.

In the beginning… Electricity turned to flesh. A billion nerves softened and shocked into blossom, slopped

with a big brush hastily onto the green velvet curtain we called spring. This

is what happens when the living gets easy. Out of the moss, a lot of little fingers clawing themselves up. Ah!

such marriage weather, but in it, too, the delicious mysteries of some other couple’s

precipitous divorce. What

was all that love but a lot of grasshoppers dancing in a crate with some overripe plums? We all

saw it coming.

“Go ahead,” is all my son wants to hear me say. “Feel free to jump on the beds today. Flap

your arms and scream for hours at the top of your lungs.” And my stepdaughter, Hey

how about I take you and all your friends to the mall, and pick you up in seven hours? First

I’d like to give you two hundred dollars.”

And why not? What

a morsel, if you could slip the bones from a hummingbird and dip the whole thing in chocolate sauce. What

was so wrong about the seventies? The Free Love, big shoes, High Times, daisy decals on the shower doors? Now and then, a few sober words about death:

Hey, kids, don’t play with matches.

Then, something changed. The states

make perfect puzzle pieces, like the decades, like the seasons, but in truth

you can find yourself crossing from Indiana to Kentucky without ever knowing you did. The child-

raccoon we fed those bagels to in the backyard yesterday is swarmed with blackflies in the road today. See

how neatly God has trained (with whips and chains) those butterflies to dance from flower to flower. A few delicate shreds of terror trembling in the air.

“I am summer, here

to please you,” the world says to me. I nod pleasantly, but don’t forget the feeling that spread just under my skin

the day a woman I’d always liked stopped me in the stairwell to tell me what she’d always hated about me as if it were advice.

Such soft ululations, such a drumroll of feathers! Yet it was no other weather than Wind. I looked up; the sky lay blue as always, Biblical and terrifying, just where it was supposed to be.

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.