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I am asking the names of wildflowers to ease me into sleep, saying them over and over, Bloodroot, Evening Lychnis, Celandine, Enchanter’s Nightshade, Coltsfoot, Wood Groundsel dissolving on my tongue.

The faces of those gone before me rise up, and those I will leave behind, my children far flung as seeds carried by wind and pelt and rain.

2. Go ahead, let the dankness of earth seep into your thighs, let dust silt your lungs, your spine crack like river ice

but the mind pulls you back up through snake skin and mist, through dry creek and river bed to the trees’ green asylum, rain smacked leaves waking you to the body’s arterial hum.

Get up while you can, full of your hunger and regret. Get up from your knees. Taste what you are, cloudburst, mud, burnt grass, words buried in iron, bone, lips, and breath, in this sorrow and honey, this skin and ash.

But then you see the poppies, a disheveled stand of them. And the sun shining down like God, loving all of us equally, mountain and valley, plant, animal, human, and therefore shouldn’t we love all things equally back? And then you see the clouds.

The poppies are wild, they are only beautiful and tall so long as you do not cut them, they are like the feral cat who purrs and rubs against your leg but will scratch you if you touch back. Love is letting the world be half-tamed. That’s how the rain comes, softly and attentively, then

with unstoppable force. If you stare upwards as it falls, you will see they are falling sparks that light nothing only because the ground interrupts them. You can hear the way they’d burn, the smoldering sound they make falling into the grass.

That is a sound for the sadness everywhere present. The closest you have come to seeing it is at night, with the window open and the lamp on, when the moths perch on the white walls, tiny as a fingernail to large as a Gerbera daisy and take turns agitating around the light.

If you grasp one by the wing, its pill-sized body will convulse in your closed palm and you can feel the wing beats like an eyelid’s obsessive blinking open to see. But now it is still light and the blackbirds are singing as if their voices are the only scissors left in this world.

to Provence—another year and still your silence lingers sly and discarnate as smoke.

I can no longer picture you as more than a held space, an inexorable lack. In this way,

you resemble the dead: ever -present and beyond my grasp.

If I could touch again your body I would not believe it,

could only wait for you to vanish like dream's vapor once I approached.

The summer we exiled each other, I drove through miles of smoke, yet never witnessed

its source. My longing like that: haze devoid of its origin.

Do I need you at all, or does my desire flourish untended, a blaze burning long past

first spark? There are fires so intractable they become

a fact of their landscape—fires like seasons by which we keep time.

There go the ships. The little buses. The sanctity, the subway. But let us stay.

Every world has pain, I knew it when I brought you

to this one. It’s true— the rain is never stopped by the children’s parade. Still

I tell you, it weakens you after a while into love.

The plastic cow, the plastic barn, The fat yellow pencil, the smell of paste.

Oh, I knew it wasn’t perfect all along. Its tears and gravities. Its spaces and caves. As I know it again today

crossing the street your hand in mine heads bowed in a driving rain.

turns dry. I miss you steadily, painfully. None of your blustering entrances or exits, doors swinging wildly on their hinges, or your huge unconscious sighs when you read something sad, like Henry Adams’s letters from Japan, where he traveled after Clover died.

Everything blooming bows down in the rain: white irises, red peonies; and the poppies with their black and secret centers lie shattered on the lawn.

What you draw as a blue stripe high above a green stripe, white-interrupted, the real sky starts at the tip of each blade of grass and goes up, up, as far as you can see. Our house stops at the roof, at the glitter-black overlap of shingles where the sky presses down, bearing the weight of space, dark and sparkling, on its back. Think of sky not as blue, not as over, but as the invisible surround, a soft suit you wear close to the skin. When you walk, the soles of your feet take turns on the ground, but the rest of you is in the sky, enveloped in sky. As you move through it, you make a tunnel in the precise size and shape of your body.

postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling

inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled

a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance, His gall—to still expect our devotion

after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could

know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice—telling you what you already know.

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?