Creation of Eve/The Crucifixion of Peter

Bark-songs, rope-burn

arc of the light shorn

Admire the windsubtle movements of him

Interiors of a bowl

high-sided

A rim's line as seen

Swing in the recent and overnight

Hieroglyphics and sadness

Both a tree and a horse

high in a crop tree

until drunk ground shattered the legs

The hemp knot between

the thighs ripped clean

Climb a tree

Define a cessation of

woods by a piece of rope

Define ground by moving across it

He was indifferent from the cross

* * *

Eve traveled a biblical terrain

Kiss around the numb to discover

where feeling begins

Sliver of a man as an arc of soap

escapes the hands

Two people raked the hillside for old bottles

countried dump needled with partials

He found a cocaine heart medicine

in the stone wall

What we all want:

reward for laying 10 yards of fitted slate

Eve in the body of Dorcas:

bottle sown beneath leaves in spring

Stand roadside in coltsfoot and salt

"Now no one can make you afraid

to be a sword on the bottom of the ocean

left for 300 years"

Orion and Simon, hunting, fishing

in the stream of rust

Eve has Orion by the belt buckle

and pulls him close

The track rejects imperfection

To become discreet at 200 miles an hour

What is complete can vanish or be remade

Zero chassis and strafe the cash crop

* * *

"Sky turns into a

glass of milk over St. Petersburgh"

Absence of stars is a valentine

a massacre. Mongrol. Maker

Shoot snow from under the fingers

Unground the lingering world

The sky over Highland is a

glass of tea a man's been steeped in

Light orange, apricots

coffee and milk, thigh the color

inside the car you pulled him from

"The inside of the car turned red

and I one-handed him out"

Men pulling men from fire

Accident smiles in your bark face

and I chased you from the laurel

* * *

She is a stagnant shape of wind. She is ancient movement trapped. Stand where the limb meets the trunk, back against the trunk as if looking out a window. There are monkeys everywhere, grey and familiar childhoods swinging around fat limbs, until one becomes trapped upside down and the others rescue it. A man says, "why don't you try it?" She can't. They must get down he says. They can't. So they jump. She feels her pelvis disintegrate. She is in the grass now, smiling because she can't believe she's alive and recently fucked.

* * *

Woken up from each rectangle

Crops seen from the air: parrotgreen

Unrib the self and rise off it

"Through her mouth has his speech"

Thought of birth by throat

Thought of corn in a field

There wasn't any blood, and then blood

The burn since has been

Game of pool played

with the table pushed against a wall

"A man, a god rather, inside a woman"

Ice chipped from the river in the form of Eve

* * *

Oil tanks collapse in Baltimore

sun rusting the junk sky

He hangs by his feet from a nail

twirls as an artificial crow from a string

a bare lightbulb off its cord

Imperfection as a bald invitation

Gather the ancient unuseable wheat

in the form of glass

Seamless and aqua vessels for medicines

Eve crossed a starless sky

to pencil him in at the belt

Assemble the vast abstractions above

A live bird hung at her throat

One grammar existed only in his face

and then it went numb

Where are you when the oil tanks

collapse and inflate?

You are the boat that sails the waters above me

Two people died on the asphalt circle

of a minor world

Leave blood on the hands

it's beautiful there

* * *

The fragments of angels

enclosed nearly all

Hairy when young

but soon become hairless

With often leathery leaves

so as to resemble a cross

Soemtimes have cork wings

Laced northern variety borealis

resembling turkey tracks in outline

Shaped as a shallow goblet

He appears loosely attached

A small tree, white, woolly

A bottomland tree

Some consider this to be only a variant

* * *

Naming the car:

"Angel-through-the-eye-of-the-needle, angel-eye, angle-iron." Cross sections reveal angels to be flesh inside, blood outside. This is why angels have red eyes.

* * *

Reducation of angles

Inappropriate forms of agriculture

His sign of civilization:

air-conditioning and novicaine

Grew a rib, grew a woman

between these banks grown into hills

the sun's chaotic diadem uncomprehending

Hudson's gunmetal rib put down

Did he know she was off him? Looks asleep

Did she know it was neither of these things?

Eve is dancing to Eddie Kirkland

floats as a proto-continent

How little the molecules move

* * *

Chopping, chopping

The race as a concise dictionary of the afterlife

Rough shotting, faint dream of reason

Counting, counting

Fetal sectional anatomy

Grammar and the pelvis hold firm

...how the world perpetually ends

in Icarus and paradox

In love with

pain not understood

(marine regions, almanac, veil

mixed sins, a secret weight)

* * *

She is warm in the grass and he smiles. She can't belive her own face as unshattered. Falling gour stories as indifferent from fucking. The bare lightbulb falls from the cord. Eve as apple. Knowledge as broken information. Newton taps a force in disguise. Flee the charred bird. Fill the pockets with fruit for the ride. Turn on the radio. Make wings from two fields. Simple knowledge: how to breathe when ground flew into the hands.

* * *

Horse-gallows, wind-tree

and the Prince of Air

Inch the limb

Tight umbilical twisting

Hung fro a nine-night

Jump from a tree

Jumped off a hill first

Jumping from his cross and still tied to it

Keep the legs up

More than a messiah could bear

man with a rope swinging his shame upside down

Moved further out and balance

Oak bark until

rope caught cord, quiver

Can you pick up the feet, St. Peter?

Swing in the drunken darkness

Paralysis in a winter constellation

Tethered to taught and leap

The tree was absolutely willing

We've seen this before

What you didn't know is

Jumping with just a rope between his legs

* * *

Angels and oaks appear in May and June

as slender dropping clusters of catkins

Are often inconspicuous

Broken, brown shells

Yellow, bitter, usually inedible

Look for the old ones on the ground

Otherwise treated as uncuplike

slow-growing, long-lived

Boil out the tannins

Forests valued most for fattening pigs

Extensive browsing by cattle invites poisoning

Snowshoe, ruffed and sharptail, bobwhite

mouring, buckblack and browse twigs

Indians were acorns

acids removed by grinding and washing with hot water

The Anglo-Saxon rule in England:

anyone wantonly injuring or destroying an oak

should be fined accordingly

* * *

Mock crucifix or

the palace of suffering

(the room swims)

where plaintain is ribgrass

When poetry is the carnival on the lawn

and the poem the carnage

"Pray for protection"

and prediction, simple algebra

It's a question of joy

of rib as river

Riverboat pilots

tell their stories

try to patent the solar system

Speedtrap:

house full of furniture

the optical quality of venetian blinds

Waking up from memory

the world as oracle

where dragonflies are "diamond needles"

where lacquer is red cabbage

* * *

A bare lightbulb hanging on its cord

and pulls him close and

then it went numb

Assemble the vast abstrations above and below:

bottles sewn beneath leaves in spring

Collapse and inflate

Countried dump needled with unseamed

bottles escape into the hands

Eve crossed a biblical terrain

Eve in the body of Dorcas

Eve has crossed a starless sky

Eve has Orion by the belt buckle

Gather the ancient unnecessary wheat above and below

He found a cocaine heart

He hangs from his feet by a nail

mouth rusted by the sea

Imperfection as death's bald invitation

It's beautiful there

Kiss around the numb to discover

Leave blood on the hands

left for 300 years

Medicine in a stone wall

"Now no one can make you afraid

of a minor world"

* * *

Fell on themselves shot down a narrow barrel

Only running. It was not a race

Unseen against the sky

"If you traveled these roads, there was trouble"

Narrow red road cut as a ring into a finger

Refugeed in Brittany

owls as burnt patches on the trees overhead

Servitude giving rise to expectant

Absence of architecture when they left

They were only playing

Take a wedding ring, cut it once, lay it flat

This is a road. This is a war

The ruin and run of things down a dirt road

"The roads were terrible, there was trouble"

A woman meeting hooves with the eye

Carts everywhere and no animals to pull them

The rifle pours a smothering grain

What did she carry toward her temporary house?

Whole life turned into a secret word

* * *

"Experience and speed have a

direct correlation to the risk

a driver faces at Daytona."

Stripped over time of its white

thoughtless cage, the body sleeps as speed

Stories recounted with rubbed hands

are things preferred as muted out

Beautiful under Plexiglas and unused

velocity as a recent type of snow

Untaintable movement aspired to

he is the rope run out if hands

tied to something heavy and falling

What is not left must be made up

Someone's mouth shakes me

Hair gathers a dirty ice

Accident as sacrament

Head bathed in the technical basin

Rub an inversion onto the back

and tie him there

* * *

Eden was a Kelvin palace

Of snow form a rib

Pool stick run up a wall

Sign of civilization simultaneous:

the rib and the woman

snow and the consideration of snow

"Solamente una juega, solamente una juega"

Steam rises off the water in the form of Eve

Subsequent indifference sunk into the ground

Swim off the side into

chlorine the color of a pool table

* * *

Two oil tanks collapse in Baltimore:

Orion and Simon, hunting, fishing

Once grammar existed only in his face

Reward for laying 10 yards of indigenous slate

Sliver of a man as an arc of soap

Stand them in coltsfoot and salt

Sun rusting the junk sky

The track rejects imperfection

There is a live bird hung at her throat

To be a sword on the bottom of the ocean

Become perfect at 200 miles an hour

Pencil him in at the belt

Fuck him at his rock

Razed at zero chassis

Strafe the cash crop

You are the boat that sails the water above me

Where you are when the oil tanks

What we all want:

where feeling begins

What is complete can vanish or be replicated

Two people died on the asphalt circle

Two people raked the hillside for bottles

Platte Clove, August Etudes

The gods and goddesses have lined up to inhabit me in bluestone, hemlock and perpetual rain. The tree trunks divide the sky into chartreuse and sumi ink. It was a rocky passage up here yesterday. The fog rolls in, the opposite mountain, the fog rolls out. Just like it does in my life: I get it, I don’t get it, I get it. Terrible things said. I sing to Patti Smith’s “Paths that Cross” on the radio. Don and I sang that together one late night, drunk, on Grand Manan almost exactly seven years ago. The song sewn forever into basalt cliffs, dulse painted coves, into whales constellated against a glassy ocean. Peter didn’t remember the song, but I did. The waterfalls tore my sleep apart last night. Sleep shredded – I lay awake in piles of it. Wool roving. Bad dreams.

Shadow in sumi ink scribbled onto that which is omnipresent in green

When running is a form of drawing

That old non-etiquette of many woodlands

As for me, it’s not that you catch me

It’s where I catch that You

Camping near a nebula of rolling fog

In that separation, my oceans enveloped in dulse

The whale design of the first song

constellated inside a marriage

Voyage out to Huckleberry Point – the hike was rocky through mosquitos, black erosions, stones cairns everywhere as if people wanted to build stone walls and then decided against it at the last minute. Me in new boots…and I know better! One step, another step, another one. Thick summer sweat in the uphills. The walk out seemed to take forever or an hour and a half, and then suddenly out of hemlocks. The white birch thickets, wild blueberry, mountain laurel. Out of it all to a sheer outlook, a Japanese scroll. I laughed that we walked so far to witness a fog obscured view. “It’s all about the damn journey,” I remind myself. We look down on the backs of soaring hawks pasted to green.

Hawks circle

a hemlock torn sky

Glasses fogged up

Enormous bonzai forms

adore rock

until something breaks

I wanted to stay all day, but as beginners, we brought nothing with us. Empty handed, new to topo maps, we craved water, pistachios, beer. Tonight I put my blistered feet up, Peter reads 1950s pulp fiction. Shadow is horizontal, exhausted. A black lab on a green floor. Slowly we resew the torn marriage fabric with our skins.

A rock passage to the top

bent cliffs into song

into whales constellated on a vitreous ocean

Platte Clove’s goddess arranges me within her

in sumi ink and lightyellow

Yesterday’s stone paragraphs

were also jeweled in Grand Manaan nearly seven years ago

This first song encircles the basalt reef

columns drawn in dulse

in whale constellated seas

Maples incarnate the world’s first use of yellow

Peter is reading “Tickets for Death” by Brett Halliday. “Life plays dirty tricks on people sometimes. If I were God, I’d arrange things differently, but I’m not God. I’m just a private dick with a job to do.”

Handwriting feels like it is no longer my writing process. Too slow to hold my thoughts, my handwritten thoughts stilted, molting. I feel lost without my computer. We’ve been here almost two days solid without leaving, and a strange thing happened when we did leave today: the world we drove through seemed too cluttered. Too many houses, too much advertising. My eyes have developed a mountainous tropism

I’m reading “A Serious Character” by Humphrey Carpenter – a biography of Ezra Pound by a biographer who hates his subject. Reading on the porch – frozen spinach pizza, glasses of New York State Niagara wine – my wine connoisseur father would plotz. New York wine for a New York poet sitting on the rim of the Catskills.

Got back to the cabin ahead of a dangerous storm. It poured for an hour. The stream behind the cabin boiled a shade deeper than hot chocolate – hot chocolate mixed with a little bit of blood: roan. Looked especially red against the hemlock and yellowgreen of August. We walked to the bottom of our waterfalls – our previous calm replaced by its evil twin. Yet the rock contained the water and refused injury. A very old form of love. Baptism soaked, home and cabined, pajama-ed at 5pm, napped, hairwet, autumn hinted at, curled into thoughts of sleep becoming sleep, shark slept, in rain, fog, cooling off into a 7^th anniversary.

“Pentimenti” – word I liked in that Diebenkorn book: previous traces, starts in a painting, painted over, left partially seen. Traces. Scars.

The tree does not fall, it’s limbs adhesive

its extremities skillful

The lack of speech in his body indicates an emptiness

And the gift: nonsense into sense

History consists of heroic couplets written in cast iron

Fruit and ravished, it pulls and tears

the syrup of her

The firewood into character in order to burn here

There is no activity which the mind does not try to finish

that expansion, is broken, never was

As for the speech of the body

only vixen (fox) or pressure

History in a falsely brave iron

executed in the throat of a wooden horse

In order to ignite the place begin with its firewood

Regarding the tree, return to the speech in the body

where the peeling feels like sense

soft and to spare the thing

When he makes candy from her syrup

To be broken and inflamed by this place

The rind of it feels direction

The I is soft and saves

The speech in our skin preserved

Thought I was too tired to write today, but will give it a whirl anyway. Stared blankly into mist, into the ubiquitous hemlocked woodland, exhausted from our trek today to Echo Lake. We got all the way out and back in about five hours, the expectation of a smooth tarn, and we got that, a bouquet of herons, and…a fucking radio tower. The walk out broken into pieces: the bluestone quarry where hikers have constructed a stone “living room” complete with chairs, tables and settee. I added a bluestone “book” to a table: two squareish leaves propped up dictionary-esque. Peter later had an Andy Goldsworthy moment and built an egg shaped obelisk as tall as himself.

The next piece: a roaring cascade next to a lean-to, the trail moving past in quatrains. Got nettled, my mouth an O of surprise, eyes clenched, legs welted. The next view out to the Hudson: a silver ribbon high on the horizon over a lower field of green, under everchanging rainclouds. Our hike today began under gungrey skies, the pages similar but always unique, sleepwalkers in tannin darkness, in mist, in ink, black and lacquer red. On a rain ripped trail, mushrooms in pink, traffic cone orange, mushrooms that looked like laboratory glass. My first bluestone book today. THAT idea would irritate a grant funder… “An edition of 100, weighing a 100 pounds each…”

Stacked, in grey lichen

Stunned into perfection

Too hard to haul out

So many hands touched here

and gone the way of fallen trees

Shadows chew branches

Hemlock black, wet feet

The sky so far from us

until the sun laughs us into being

I cannot sing the land

underfoot until it tells

me on which note to begin

I begin in two bluestone slabs

on a table

in the Catskills’ living room

I’ve been smiling to myself, how irritating it would be to produce an edition of bluestone books: two pages propped open with a short phrase carved at the tope of the page. A geologic “Once upon a time…” or “In the beginning…” Stone as a carrier of text.

To set up the question and answer it

This man who dies in local stone

entered an I, a curving sound

The smile, how it enrages

Text colonizes bluestone

Always cut the same, through the eye of the letter e

How cutting is always the same

How grave the text?

How slight is it possible to be?

How the question establishes:

To write an I into the curved noise of broken

The text takes the stone

Like a chisel, the text

In order to write an I, encircle the noise

I smile into the book of blue ash

That I should pull you up on fire

Both parties, ardent in their mouths

When noise walks around in the form of a person

Hope to make something out of these roughcuts. The best part of the whole residency experience was being able to shelve the enormous energy it takes to continue forward with the writing, the art; to put down my own exhausting self-motivation because someone else believed in my work enough to help me do it. And they could take on the motivating for a change. Even my bones are composed of gratitude.

In me, a reconsideration of the cancer book

an expanse of green onion smiles

You are that comfort

His questions begin generally and identically

always cut the same, through the eye of a letter

Somewhat in order to be possible

In order to write, the noise avoids the person

The geology of goodbye

Thinking of the text on Huguenot gravestones in the tiny cemetery in New Paltz, how the carving is always the same, like a typeface. How to chisel text. How small can it be. How to set up problems and how to solve them. How to bring the dead man up through his native stone into my own crooked voice.

Considered again, the cancer book

Your this and comfort

An atheist on fire

full of affection, a summary of expressions

Geology? One hour is enormous

The boulder bed and its reduction always

New Paltz, new with small ideas

The question: who decides it and method

Did you write that I stopped beginning?

The consolations bookmarked in the book of cancer

smiling against payment

She thinks always they are small, and everything

That and the question that decides method

You wrote her as if she were me, a summary of noises

at the point at which the curve stopped

Still, the bulb of this green, that it consoles

One hour is enormous

The ratio of possible to certainty

The place where morning attaches itself to day

An unexpected pleasure: Tom, Nancy, Elena and Giani stop by and we walk down to the falls before night falls on us. They love it, and Shadow is well behaved for a change. Elena is seven and loves the cabin. She and Giani drink juice and pet a hike-calm Shadow Shark. Tom and Nancy ooo and ahhh about our luck in being able to stay here for 10 days. Elena doesn’t want to leave, threatens to hold on forever to the arm of the sofa. They are loud and funny and we stare at them nodding, not saying much after time folded up in the hemlocks.

In spring, the farmer and his accomplice

touch maple to make sugar

In July and August, the woman and the boy

penetrate the bark of the country

to break the skins of raspberries, black caps

The spirit is inventive, floats

across the luminous mornings of August

Between harvests of the I

The person compared to the sugar, satisfied

The jaws of the trout itch in the Black Creek

I’d like to improve the volatile view of you

Notes taken in maple wood turn into sugar

She finds herself wearing only the skins of berries

Harvesting the I, my bright harvest

compared to the tenderness in fruit, compared with play

compared to sugar

Form is a centerline, where volatility decreases

Her skin barks to all countries

Raspberries are an old piercing into the woman

an accomplice in play

We decided to visit John Burroughs’ late life refuge Woodchuck Lodge and his burial site. Drove many miles through steamy, dramatic mountains to Roxbury. The lodge was closed, pretty damn rustic, probably exactly as Burroughs left it, but incredibly drab. Stood on an old metal folding chair on the porch to peer through curtained windows. For a man so in love with the natural world, his indoors were ugly, spiteful. We walked a short incomprehensibly numbered trail around the house. I ate a raspberry – over ripe, a cartoon flavor of raspberry. Peter cut some peppermint from the culvert in front of the house and got it started in some water. “Mint from our dead neighbor’s house,” he said. Bees nested loudly in a high eve.

Spring sits inside the farm in the form of sugar

The boy in raspberry and black raspberry

his countries sewn into the spine of August

The skin of her voice

the woman who barks against the hazards in skin

Between myself and the morning is

the mind that carries a harvested hazard

July arrives and the boy is in raspberry countries all day long

The skin of her danger

black raspberries penetrate her to roar in dangerous skin

Completely east of arrival

compare the fruit to the sugar to the person at play

The day that floated in June arrived to be harvested in August

We mistakenly thought his grave was near the house, so we tramped through high fields of yarrow, mint, queen Anne’s lace trying to find his grave based on obscure clues: east of house, view of mountains. Giving up, we decided to drive further and found the memorial field, an informational kiosk, blue bird houses, picnic tables, an arrow-shaped hand lettered sign that said “gravesite.” His grave was a geometry of stacked lichened bluestone with taller corners. Inside the stone walls was vinca, lily of the valley, blooming ladybells. Looked out over many mountains. White Man Mountain? Plattekill? Round Top? His grave placed in front of his cherished boyhood rock with a bronze plaque. I brought him news from West Park. We drove off further and found his family homestead. The hilltop had 360 degree views. What else could that view spawn but Burroughs?

The grave: a higher form of geometry

Ladybells bloom inside this stonework, this grave

placed before the stone of your boyhood

where bronze has attached itself to the mountain

I read the news from West Park in him

The tomb accumulates

A garden in scratch and blister, lichened to the joints in him

The geometric gazette becomes the grave

where the vinca blooms the blue eye of a tiled day

Before stone, the boy who forms day

in a place where importance is bronze

More field than family

The spectacle that is Burroughs, inside the something else

A bulletin to the grave

blistered it to grasp a lichened place

Vinca blossoms, an act of labor in sky blue eyes

The message of geometry inside the grave

in order to seize, lichen employed

Invest in old bronze and this grave which is attached

The cabin is quiet except for the sound of Shadow eating. Peter left, Steve is asleep. I’m gnawing on a hunk of reblechon. We climbed our toughest hike yesterday: the circle that includes Indian Head Mountain. We began here at Platte Clove and ended up at Prediger Road. Took us about five hours. We began in overcast skies, took off and eventually the uphills became more and more severe. Every time we’d hit a flat spot and see a trail marker above us I’d think “fuck fuck fuck fuck…” and will myself upward.

Shadow was our Outward Bound leader by the end. He’d run ahead, check the trail, run back and urge on the stragglers (Steve and I), run ahead again. His eight miled enthusiasm was completely inspiring and kept me moving. He was a Shadow illuminated. The first overlook was completely enclouded. I begged Peter and Steve to wait, to see if the clouds would break. After a few minutes, we could see a glowing line, backlit, which would become the spine of a mountain. We could see the Bruderhoff below and left. The entire world unrolled from its cotton, and we could see it all. Chocolate, sardines, Raclette, pepperoni… Not in that order. Before we got here, we sat under a rock outcrop and stopped for lunch while a rainstorm passed over us and we ate in the dry.

We stroll the wreckage

make notes in a soft diary and the grey

He admires the way it rises precisely

above the moss and blossoms

with a basic heart shaped like a river

A form of botany, except for its color

A high bunch of young alones

The thin decadent root of a birch

its leaves shine curiously

richly mounted, strung together

The false greens in winter that exhale May

a weak pink flower with orchard breath

A private grey diary and brook trout

The I inside time, inside a long piece of birch bark

To peel too much

Precision rises in foam sheets

We encountered a very steep “up.” I was worried that Shadow wouldn’t make it, but Peter heaved him up the 40 foot rockface, flat after flat, until he reached the top. That Shadow actually let Peter do this is a miracle. Later, we had to go hand over hand, reaching for outcrops, tree roots to heave ourselves forever upwards. The second “impossible” ascent Shadow could NOT make, so Steve and I scaled the treeroots placed so perfectly as handholds. Peter took Shadow the long way around and we met at the top.

I canter the Wreckage

which emerges as a soft diary in grey

She has been inside bark for a long time

to form and bloom with a fundamental heart

exterior to color

I count in multiplicity: six

Adjacent to a false winter, the garden breathes in and out

The small trout stream inside a loss of chance

Soft and grey

chance stretches, wakes up from the wreckage

which creates in me, takes a walk

The interior color of the heart and the leaf

The orchard’s suction is weak

contiguous to May’s green winter spire

In becoming

you go away for a long modification

That grey, that tension, that permission

that walks out of the wreckage

that shouts a methodological inspection of the skin

in a barking voice

The possibility of the soft mass being defeated is small

The flower which measures the oldest sibling

The leaf which exists beyond praise

The birch canoe for your going away

The wastefulness in his shoulders paddling

The enormous fold of the new botany

The wooden feet of the enemy

Absorbed, inaccurate, weak: the fragile May spire inside winter

that mooring cable to spring

The last overlook: blue skies, cool wind, The Ashokan Reservoir to our right, the Hudson to our left, looking down the vertebrae of the hemlock forest. Worth the entire climb, every seemingly impossible ascent. We reached the top of Indian Head Mountain without knowing it. Hemlock, dark tannined soil, mosses, ferns, and ourselves hauled overland. Some of the stone climbs were not so bad going up, but I dreaded having to descend them. We decided to take the hike as a loop to avoid having to come back down the way we came. It was risk: the unknown in exchange for the impossible known. Chocolate and caramels became a form of encouragement downward.

Peter looks more and more like a Catskill mountain man, a portable fable: waxed cowboy hat, mountaineering shorts, an ancient belt, black t-shirt, bright orange raincoat, backpack, and… a black garbage bag skirted around his waist to keep his legs dry.

The flower that measures the oldest geology

Time reads to me

folded into the sheets between the weeks

When you do not congratulate

and you leave in the birch canoe

for the wastefulness of six things

The enormous fold is new with botany

His wooden feet, the boredom in extremity

Bludgeon in order to take sleep as a form of land

His orchards are completely self-absorbed

May’s green arrow through the heart of winter

sews the cable of marriage

The skin of their voices skinning over

Inside the soft mass of possibility

defeat is small

The oldest moments of the child, and the wastefulness of botany

The enormous fold sets north

Time determines how greyed our will

Down the other side of Indian Head Mountain was easier, but two vertical miles down a rainfilled, eroded streambed wasn’t easy. I enjoyed all the “foot thought” this time, the puzzling out of every step in choices between rocks, between water and the thick hemlock mat between red mud and stone. We got home: blown-out and thankful. Peter used up the last of the avocados for guacamole. We had yesterday’s fresh corn (not too fresh anymore), ribs and mojitos. A small fire in the woodstove to dry things out, but I think a front passed through last night, so maybe blueness is here for a while.

Peel back the black throated to blue

A bracken languid midsummer

Notes tumble from my ear

The upward slide of a summer insect

destitute, plaintive rhythms

An unhurried sound like the woods

This is the only love song Audubon has

The woods repeat his listless indolence

The woods rhyme with the present

His back and crown are dark blue

his throat and breast black

his abdomen pure white, a white spot on each wing

The birch tree mixes with skin

in a black throated, slow acting midsummer

The blue color in black

The summer insect is not helpless

in its uncomplaining rhythms

The slow acting, unhurried sound of wood

fat and remarkable

The pushed wood of a beech and the maple wood pulls us slowly

on the trail

The indolent pleasure of this gift

Steve and I talked all morning about how we live in a time when “everyone” is an artist in some ways. Talent has become socialist. How it’s an affront to the “everyone is an artist” idea to work at a high level of expertise. How regular people in our circles (co-workers, family, some friends) hate it when you shoot for great art or music or writing. I run into this all the time at work. I’ve worked with Leah Cleopatra on the “don’t shine too brightly” thing. I thought it was a family dynamic, but Steve has the same thing, so there might be a cultural component to it. That America thrives on mediocrity. Look at our president!

Hemlock mixes with skin

Audubon does not hear a love song under any condition

In him, there is only a white point in each wing

Midsummer barks black throated to blue

The insect has the summer in it

Can he master a woman as thought?

With boldness, with physical instruction

in methods using small numbers

A forest congested with beech

possessing the taste of stop, the taste of cause

The insect which is outside summer

the poverty heavy hearted

The forest is tired of that thing called “dog”

Our identical free shedding of blood

across the trail

In the lower part of all situations: a lovesong

Love above all being master of this woman, this thought, this thing

The fame of shedding blood by physical instruction

The taste of beech leaves in the throat box

Read the “Taste” section in Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses and thought of chocolate, vanilla, truffles, mixed with the smell of woodsmoke in the cabin.

The forest beeches mix into skin

When black is tired risk in my ears

The normality of noise is strange and heavyhearted

The insect, poverty, airy interiors

The forest tired of the dog of the thing

The identical free loss of blood endangers

the lower part of situations

The low and naked taste of beech

The resentments, the repetitions

The white point of each wing, the box of her throat

the black color of our backs in flight

43. Poetic Subjects

Arrow The grass near bamboo or hail

Round leaves, flat boats on

smoke a river of violet oats, foam

In water, the tangerine color dispersed

the In bamboo

hail and colts

important the circulation of boats

the violent association

city Tangerine absent-minded

The official held in low esteem

Distracted

in Mandarin green

The absent reeds

The Mandarin green screw

of the pear tree

Smooth boats hulled in round leaves

a river of violet oats

watermoss, the lawn is extinguished

The vital city with bamboo and hail

river of moss, water

scatter the green

The official held in low esteem

The grass dispersed to green and exhausted

scattered the green screw of the pear tree

Note: Written at the end of the second millennium, this poem is a rethinking, a modernization of a section from "The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon" which was written at the end of the first millennium by a courtesan during the Heian period in Japan.

137. Clouds

A: Crimsons and blacks

When they are controlled by air

It charms downward

To see a thin wisp of cloud

Pierce a luminous moon

Colors which leave at dawn

B: Love and purple clouds, black whites

I love the black clouds viola

To fascinate from within

The tonalities that they leave as dawn

The white clouds of rain directed by wind

The twilight of clouds gradually in order

C: I love the black viola of the clouds

And men and the white clouds

referred by wind

Fascinate for the lower surface of the level inside inward

The faith which is described by Chinese poetry

consulted by the wind

D: Master the black viola of the clouds and the men and white clouds of rain

It fascinates more for the surface under possible

When faith is the curtain that covers the dawn

E: Control the black crimson of viola

clouds and the clouds of man

The whites of the rain

It fascinates more for surface under possible

that which considers the progressive twilight described as “cloud”

the end to which gives return

Faith, as described in Chinese poetry

as something which indicates the curtain

To consider the wisps that cover the moon

which resemble Chinese peonies

F: If you control the black high-red

from the viola of the clouds

Winds are advised

It fascinates more for the surface

the progressive twilight of faith

The moon which resembles much

G: If managed high-red from

the black viola of the clouds

a man in the rain recommends the wind

It fascinates more for surface

Under the possible level for the inner part of the inside

which the progressive shadow of the cloud has considered

the extremity that is faith

which is described in Chinese Poetry as something one

“stretches, visualizes, then it leaves them in the shovel”

The extremities consider slivers of the moon

H. He will be assured to recommend the high-red

the black color of viola, the clouds that are man

The wind fascinates the surface

The gradual penumbra of consider

The wisps of the moon which are similar to faith

The March Garden

Who wouldn’t say that factories

keep an order

with against depression or gardening?

Going to bed with a book in the garden…

The omnipresent hot grey mud called a “backyard”

The last years have been weedy

I will have to kill a book of work, cover it in newspaper

benign Still. These kisses are me thinking

He can choke her single form with benign negligence

The morning is unsure that the hollyhocks will survive it

Vague signs, her aconite nape, the downside of winter

negligence Jonquils emergent, unpeel the garden from its winter

Blowout and success almost stops the

hydrangeas as if good, as if the year could be classified as “good”

Hollyhocks did not affirm the survival of her damaged sternum

Vague symbols attached to winter

Saffron crocus, jonquils urgent

The iris has not yet skinned the winter off the rock garden

Morning stuns the depressed garden

in The question always: bed or books?

Indoor heat omnipresent, as pessimistic as a cement well

The work spreads out to kill a year, like an affair

carelessness Any leaves behind her are unfortunate truth

Canned good are never as good as an affair

something blown like success or perhaps

only Every hydrangea is as good as a classified year

The heart is a vague symbol, as vague as these recent winters

There is a range of morning that weakens the garden

Factories maintain the bed with thoughts of books in a garden

The beds in the front yard spread with murder

An excess occurs like news

The leaf cover in the period of a year

Still. You go away with unfortunate truth

As for her, she’s a very large numeral that continues to increase

then Anxious, the possible morning, kissed to consider

Partial only has something against her

the In success justly to be careless, indistinct symbols

If monkshood, then the unbent winter

Upside the saffron crocus is jonquil urgent

unbent The first small sized iris screen, their frantic skin

The garden is somewhat weakened by arrangement

Cement and telephones are omnipresent

The end to threaten a central dissemination of the murderous bed

I must invest the work with any excess I have

The years measured in leaves and newspapers

Still, the you with me in consequence of unhappy truths

How much of her is simply the result of grand numerals?

uncommonly An increase kissed in possible mornings

Partial cast into perhaps

Form neglects to pierce her in tin

Everything is uncommonly hydrangea good

hydrangea The center of the wound is the will, indistinct symbols

Winter unbent with aconite

under a layer of winter monks. Still there are some flowers

The underside of saffron: jonquil urgent

good The first skins, frantic-sized, an iris unpeeled

The end of arrangement

released from families, beds, factories, from books

The cuts are pessimistic, built with cement

a telephone end threatened

A central diffusion over a fatal bed, periodical excess

To what number will she increase?

Impatient with kisses: the morning

Have you considered just how much having an I costs?

The Partial is never only something to him

neglected tournaments, the rare good in hydrangeas

Japan This health which must classify this year

The Japan of functions, the correct applications of wood and when

The winter slackened with aconite, layers of monks

of The winter ceases continuing

Saffron upstream, jonquils pressed

functions The first skins in the rock garden

Morning: the end of arrangement

The pessimism in cement

noting that smallness is almost absence

The fatal bed invested with days

She or the excess

Funeral periodicals in the duration of a year

Grudge increased with morning, spared needs

The silence is graded

Intelligences peel from the hollyhocks

The extra prize of will

Loosened from sleep, aconite layered with winter monks

Indistinct symbols stand in for winter

“Always” flowers, jonquils pressed high

The iris in first skins, limitlessly small, unpeeled

The A factory intended end of arrangement

Pessimism adheres to a small absence

end The days collapse into a fatal bed, invests in time

Magazines and funerals

of Quite hydrangea!

A bowl dried with danger

She loosens her neck from winter’s monks

arrangement A screen of jonquils in place of first skins, limitlessly

Beds are systemic arrangements of morning

The edges of day tacked with funerals, entirely a book

The public land that sits down with you attached

You are ardent with deformation

something adhered to pessimism that has an absent mouth

Days anteriorly with funerals and magazines

As if time could rescue her

from morning and its attendant emergencies

The dangers inherent in carrying around other people’s sleep

The I thrown together excessively with jonquils at normal angles

Morning reorganizes weakly around a family or a factory

ardently The books or public earth planned

ardently toward deformation

She feeds adhesions and pessimism into an absent mouth

Buckets filled with funerals, days, uniforms

toward Height and the possibility of leaving

shoot the excess that divides us

The excessive price of sleep against her neck

Monks in winter begin to look to her like liberations

The sign that is the calm continuation of winter, indistinct

deformation Hours, skins, stones form a screen, limitlessly