1. There’s a piece of you hanging like an old jacket on an old nail beside a job I never finished. 2. Twilight lashes us, which always wasn’t this way, this step in another direction. Now my mouth is against your wetness and all you’ve shaken loose. I hear you say you have waited forever for this talk of mine. Never again will I argue for the hours we have lost getting here. 3. Listen, the mercury is resolved. Beneath my hand the Earth passes a quick shadow, recollects the distinction of a breath. A new feather finds a warm wing to grow from. The cup and the juice, the Earth and the seed, are one. The secret is the grip, by the finger- nails if need be. Mostly by a corner of the mind, an edge where a root strikes, curls like a rattler. Sometime the heart’s enough. Later, past the next tense of mind, we will think of now: grass clearing its throat, ground cover ripe of ballistics, your hands at introduction. You will be a poem, a voice on a page, a leaf rising from the ashes of a winter tree, a sound from white space. If never comes we shall never forget: grass ripe, you rich, me urgent. 4. I would have gone except for your saying at the last moment how awful apart would be like discarding the apple core Eve retrieved to see if there was one bite left.

You’re sixty years underground, Voice hanging yet in treble And pitch, so much of Yeats On record talking of Innisfree Or old marble heads. The poems you read, summerway, Porched with the moon, liquid, Turf-cut, spaded, black-buttered With promise, besieged, sent out On Ireland’s black ships, Are just alive as you, freed From the holds of dread crossings, fed to the fish or buried in the new land, the escape complete from turnips, potatoes, drought. The hunger there is hungered here, The throat dry and impulsive Down past recognition, the ache As sure as echoes when seals Call across harbors heralding. I’ve lost you so many times, let you Slip into the bare consciousness Of February or September days, my skin More at reading than eyes, forgetting The phenomenon of your voyage – Ten, alone, family-sanctioned To be the first of its Irish sailors, Cast out by rude vegetables, economy; You must have pained at the coming, A scout ahead of the horde. Here you sank a pick in hardpan, Poured your brow into great red Neckerchiefs, laid a railroad, a canal, Built someone’s empire in Manhattan, Thrust nine children into Massachusetts. A thousand times I’ve walked the ground You walked on, trod your rounds, Your aspirations, found your dreams Brick-hard at intersections, side roads, Left you marginally, my own feet tinkered. Still, the constant pressure’s known, Names falling out of night, children Of the children of the droughty land, Here where things seem realized, At these eyes, by this heart, by hands That play on infernal machines. I am In the beginning of your third century, Have throbbed in your old cottage, Felt the knots root underground, trebled My voice where morning calls answers. Peat, piled behind the house, ingots Of new tenant’s digging, kept the kettle At a soft steam on a green stove. In the Corner where you slept before journey, a small star bore through, called your name.

Out of the edge of earth, out of choice darkness mixed with silt and angry acids that form of fire, out of secret caverns rocking in the deep, out of stone moving liquefied which is but a sea we float on, out of distance, out of death-wracking night, out of fear of childhood, out of nightmares and terror shrieks, out of ignorance, out of shame of thoughts sitting like pebbles on the soul, dark black pebbles, out of the songs of frenzied air, out of the mouth of monster bird cast from an angry god’s hands, freed from the moon at endless wait, escaping from a debtor’s prison partly in rags and partly in pain, heaved upward like a mason’s block to the next tier of gray waiting, on the hilltop comes the sun. Before it, pell-mell fleeing, scudding down alleyways, across corners, stoops, half granite walls where houses used to be, through windows and mirrors and the wiliest of laces where night collects itself in a host of aromas, the shadows go quickly before the miracle hunting them down, at chase, at wild pursuit, leaping one wall to the next, one huge lunge across barriers, time, as if breath will expire too quickly again. I listen. The sizzle starts: limbs grating each other. Horns and klaxons announcing. Clocks unwinding. Linens cracking their sheer porcelain deposits only odors can tell of. Percolators, motors, engines, dynamos, all huffing and puffing and snorting Orion away. Pulses and electricity beating at the lines, the mad energies of beginnings. Being heard, being sound, being echoes and static-filling air waves. Being noise, 3 A.M. surprises, movement and energy and time happening to inertia and all its cached parts. Being lifebelts to jet darkness. Being chance. Being opportunity all the way into something new. Hardness gathers in the sunlight, artifacts of mining and distillery, elements from miner’s foot and glazier’s thumb, copper tubing and greened-up brass, old galvanized iron tongues still wagging, PVC like a saint among water carriers hardly getting dirty like Din Din Din, porcelain dishes and ewers with light cherry trimmings faint as postage stamps, buckets and ladles catching at breaths before sudden plunges down Earth’s throat, bring morning’s water to a thousand hands. At Earth edge the worm shudders, recoils, goes gelatin. Earth shakes with a robin’s sprint across a quick lawn, as if drummers’ batons beat on. He spears the tubed, eyeless thing, soft telescopic escapee just now plowing into loam. The warning signs are warm. Bridges, high arcs measuring new light, fields and fields of steel and concrete, I-bars and T-bars and girders and purlings and struts and bolts and nuts and plates by the high acre, and expansion joints as devious as grill work begin to stretch their backs, spread a little more to east or west or north and south, begin to stuff themselves into corners barely meant for stuffing, cast off their chilled auras, breathe outward under the new caress, the touch of secret places, the mouth of morning touching where it touches best. Steel stretches into sunlight. You can hear it flex its muscles. Windows, like incorrigible children. Talk back: skyscraper faces, greenhouses. Across the street a woman’s room leaps with the explosion. She could be nude behind that glow! A car’s windshield becomes a moving target, throws flares back at the enemy. Chrome answers too, tracer streaks of gunships, firefights, strafing upward from an inversion of light and war and outside forces and death of darkness; hallway corners, dank and drear and wet with blood, give up the fight. Under stairs, attics, old coal bins webbed and smelling of gas under a spider’s collection of glass and flies and moths silent for eternity, throw in the sponge. Windows answer like gunshots, bomb blasts. Grenadiers of the dawn. Calligraphers. Signalers. Corps upon corps of morning glass, cohorts of the inner anvil, armies, legions of light, great stationary convoys basking for split seconds in eternal flame. But then, I get warm. A bird, retreated on a dark bough, umbrellaed under leaf canopy, glad for morning, worm sights, a level of breeze he can climb on and part fingers of his wings on thermals, hellos me all inside out. He is crisp and clear and singular. He is unique and melodious and real, the torrents of his heart pounding on the slanted shelves of air, his notes as sure as rungs on a ladder of resonance lifting the aria to unknown stratas, flinging it over the slow river slowly filling up with silvering day, cascading song and joyous light and the energy of a breeze, like a mountain being emptied of all its goodness. In the morning mountains, like sundaes piled high with sweet textures, explode. I catch the mouthy shrapnel they throw into the battle dawn wages. It is rare beauty on the fly, beams and sunshine flares and streams and colossal stripes of golden air coming through clouds hanging loose as line-hung blankets. Mountains are the first to get the sun, heaving upward white cones of snow as brilliant as stars, as sure and as steady as old men who know all answers and give off such illumination. But you there, at the crossroads of this day, looking across the inviolate stretch of gray light we suddenly find between us yet joining us, must also find the ignition as spectacle born in the rigors of yesterday’s soul. You, too, know the upshot of this new coming, the bird, the fire, the breath as deep as stone. You, too, must linger where the sun warms first, the first warm spot of the day, the bay window broad as an ax sweep, a piece of porch tilted under a pine, a front door stoop as white as first thoughts, a path between corrupt oaks and sleek birches, a blanket where your hand falls to rest, the place in your eye reserved for sudden starts when you think all about your being is still dark and the nightmare is the bark of wild dogs crawling down the banners of your mind like spiders of light on the move. When it all goes down, when the bet is paid off and all markers set straight, the sun comes with its singular entry, its warm shot, its two fingers of life into my glass.

At four, near dawn, resident with trees, a mountain’s wind song, a moon that clashed with clouds perky as lambs, friends loving behind me though six feet apart at times, I pissed off the wide porch down into the unknown, that good talking beer talking good again, crisply, this way and that, on the quick glass of leaves. The sound stole, even for a moment, all the moon and the cool threat of snow. But at the last shattering of a leaf, at the end of beer talk, I was the aggregate of selves knowing Apple Pine Mountain, was constant and one, a kind of uniform loneliness with stars punching down their pneumatic cries, the million years of their dying that one would hear their voices. Oh, I heard, between trees and close shadow burst, between the thrills of impulse, between molecules, the significance of sound. Oh, I listened, my friends, I listened and grew dizzy because I heard, from stars by way of clouds, from loam by way of blade and leaf, from every joint and joist of the cabin, after pissing off the porch, love.

This appointment came when light tired, this arrangement, this syzygy of him and me and the still threat of a small red star standing some time away at my back, deeper than a grain of memory. I am a quarter mile from him, hard upward on this rugged rock he could look up to if only his eyes would agree once more, and it’s a trillion years behind my head or a parsec I can’t begin to imagine, they tell me even dead perhaps, that star. Can this be a true syzygy if one is dead, if one is leaning to leave this line of sight regardless of age or love or density or how the last piece of light might be reflected, or refused, if one leaves this imposition? The windows of his room defer no light to this night, for it is always night there, blood and chemicals at warfare, nerve gone, the main one providing mirror and lethal lens, back of the eyeball no different than out front, but I climb this rock to line up with another rock and him in the deep seizure of that stolen room, bare sepulcher, that grotto of mind. Today I bathed him, the chest like an old model, boned but collapsible, forgotten in a Detroit back room, a shelf, a deep closet, waiting to be crushed at the final blow, skin of the organ but a veneer of fatigue, the arms pried as from a child’s drawing, the one less formidable leg, the small testes hanging their forgotten-glove residuum, which had begun this syzygy, the face closing down on bone as if a promise had been made toward an immaculately thin retrieval, and, at the other imaginable end of him, the one foot bloody from his curse, soured yet holier in mimicry of the near-Christ (from Golgotha brought down and put to bed, after god and my father there are no divinities), toenails coming on a darkness no sky owned, foot bottom at its own blood bath, at war, at the final and resolute war with no winner. Oh, Christ, he’s had such wars, outer and inner, that even my hand in warmth must overcome, and he gums his gums and shakes his head and says, sideways, mouth screwed into his outlandish grin, as much a lie as any look, as devious, cold-fact true, “I used to do this for you,” the dark eyes hungry to remember, to bring back one moment of all those times to this time; and I cannot feel his hand linger on me, not its calluses gone the way of flesh or its nails thicker now than they ever were meant to be, or skin flaking in the silence of its dust-borne battle, though we are both younger than the star that’s behind us and dead perhaps, as said; then, in a moment, and only for a moment, as if all is ciphered for me and cut away, I know the failure of that small red star, its distillation and spend still undone, its yawn red as yet and here with us on the endless line only bent by my imagination, the dead and dying taking up both ends of me, neither one a shadow yet but all shadows in one, perhaps a sort of harmless violence sighting here across an endless known.

It was always horses, dragging ice to the wooden ramp obeying chugs of the gasoline engine, their traces often slack as the ice slid on ice and thundered slowly and resolutely from hard shore to hard shore. Up the ramp the ice cakes lumbered, six feet of Arctic beauty before the huge saw found the blue and silver-red signals sitting just under cover and waiting to flash once more before sawdust poured down on their frantic coloring. I have no hard memory of the men who steamed their labors on the hard pond, who swore and drank coffee from bottles whiskey belonged in, who went gloveless and carefree and irreverent to winter. Of their faces I have no memory, or names, or how they spent their money downtown, or where they trod for stitches when the angry saw went haywire. I only know they poled ice floes and huge cakes with an indifferent touch, that they argued long hours against the cold, the wind, and the incessant need and desperate need for sleep, that at zero degrees they mopped brows with red kerchiefs large as sails. They were the reverse itinerants who came not for fruit but for ice drop, who appeared one Saturday in December and began to take away pieces of our pond, huge rectangular chunks they hitched up to horses shrouded wholly in steam, their wide mouths rimmed by thick lips often white with frost around the red tongues. They wore soft felt hats, brimmed, jackets so odd you could not find a mate, but boots with horsehide laces, wide belts, and looked westward where the sun would set part ways through the afternoon. In latest July, ever, you could find December deep in the icehouse under the waves of orange sawdust still wet with some of their sweat, a cool hideaway to puff the stub of a cigarette, touch a breast, play hide and seek for hours as winter sprawled under our feet cold and foreboding and nearly two floors high inside redan walls two feet thick. Mostly I remember the eyes of a horse who plunged through the ice, like great dishes of fear, wide and frightened and full of the utmost knowledge. His front hooves slashed away at the ragged rim of ice, but could not lift him out, or leather traces or ropes or sixty feet of chain, and when he went down, like a boat plunging, huge bubbles burst on the surface and a December afternoon became quiet. We stood transfixed, as if frozen in the gray of that day, the itinerant workers, other horses at rest, my shod friends, as Rapid Tucker’s Pond began its disappearance under the edge of yesterday.

For hours he’d been diving for God knows what, a ballistic bursting air each time he came up fanning for life, amateur at what I was good at, surviving, reaching under all of Neptune it seems. He brought up a stone, gray, smooth as the millennium, travel yet indelible, still worth rubbing, he said when asked. Then, For what? To August sun he marked it, aloft, victor’s clutch, For the Pacific, he said. Promising to write, he left, the stone under denim underway. And this he says: I did the lakes, the Nations, the high grass for miles, dry lands, Badlands, the Parks burning for weeks, false mountains climbing into Idaho’s shadows. Now, mosquito-ravaged, money gone, tired of the weight of it all, I have flung it into Alaska’s Pacific, rubbed it one last time for you, that Atlantic charm, drowned it in water it knew just ten million years ago before I came along, Owen McReigghily, biker, Christ-bearded my own descriptor, who pays no taxes, lives no place but arbor, dry culvert, waddies back where mountains have beginnings. I’ve done my passage here, freed Nahant Atlantic’s stone to taste new salt. Something will touch it yet, burn it, shape it, clutch the warmth of my hands where I rubbed in time, grind it for stars not yet begun. (Best of luck to Laura and hers)

World-viewed incandescence; sun up under his wings with last quick volley, slipping through a hole in the sky, lilting the soon-gray aura without a sound, an evening hawk appears above us. From Yesterday he comes, from Far Mountains only Time lets go of. Under wings steady as scissors a thermal gathers, not sure the joy is ours, or his. It flings him a David-stone racing the Time-catch at heart, at our throats. There is so much light falling down from him, from wing capture, we feel prostrate. To look in his eye would bring back volcano, fire in the sky, a view of the Earth Earth has not seen yet. In apt darkness chasing him, in the mountains where gorge and river give up daylight with deep regret, his shadow hangs itself forever, the evening hawk sliding mute as a mountain climber at his work, leaving in our path the next hiker’s quick silence, stunned breath, the look upward on a frozen eye and a driftless wing caught forever.

With cold iron we pulled her up through a mouth of ice, the pale blue and white dress twisted as if some unearthly god had fouled her further paleness, eyes hammered shut, her hair caught in one final sweep. Night too trod silver on her face where a faint star shone. Parents, rooted, twined, came part of the moaning adrift on darkness, wind and water at turmoil. This was her great step forward, escape from smaller joys, a mouth of water at elsewhere sears away the parching, leaks down through the dry scars of July, a throat driven arid by August with its harsh fistfuls. At another time she ladled the worn pewter cup at well, cooled her lips with a moment of deep rock, roots shifting underground, years of sediment from up this other rocky throat. Stars shine there, passing softly through the bucket handle, where the Seven Sisters see Seven Sisters in that low field. Oh, we raked her in from the stars.