The first night at the monastery,
a moth lit on my sleeve by firelight,
long after the first frost.
A short stick of incense burns
thirty minutes, fresh thread of pine
rising through the old pine of the hours.
Summer is trapped under the thin
glass on the brook, making
the sound of an emptying bottle.
Before the long silence,
the monks make a long soft rustling,
adjusting their robes.
The Emperor thought of his heart as a water wheel
flooding the rice fields of all creation
and bloodied the water for a better harvest.
His warriors hoped for a life with wings.
His swallowtails wrote him the same lines
— the secret of life is a resurrected worm —
He told them eventually time would run backwards
in their hands, now empty where a crossbow went.
Krakatau split with a blinding noise
and raised from gutted, steaming rock
a pulverized black sky, over water walls
that swiftly fell on Java and Sumatra.
Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam,
the last known member of Equus quagga,
the southernmost subspecies of zebra, died.
Most of the wild ones, not wild enough,
grazing near the Cape of Good Hope,
had been shot and skinned and roasted by white hunters.
The redbreast kills
and kills itself against
the window
Sooner or later the blood in the breast will break the window into hundreds of pieces you can swallow whole
Keep swallowing
The redbreast
loves you and wants you
to remember the love
So it makes you puke into the toilet blind
I was blinded by love
And drowned
in an empty bathtub
spitting up birdshit
Covered in red feathers
Just seen, running, and silver-gray
along the top tube of a fence between myrtles and me,
too slinky for a bird and even at this distance
unmistakably a quadruped and
nimble, some sort of unspoiled animal, but which?
It ran as if away
from a threat, peril was everywhere,
a footsole crunches it, it is mangled
by a tire’ s treads, hawk scoops it, turkey buzzard
pecks at it, no speech mitigates its pains,
even the cat fools with it, until, inedible,
it is kicked into the gutter. There she goes,
Fish of the flood, on the bankèd billow
Thou layest thy head in dreams;
Sliding as slides thy shifting pillow,
One with the streams
Of the sea is thy spirit.
Gean-tree, thou spreadest thy foaming flourish
Abroad in the sky so grey;
It not heeding if it thee nourish,
Thou dost obey,
Happy, its moving.
A range of clouds banked up behind the peak
Of that apocryphal
Blue mountain, with a wide, oblique
Burst of late sun
Projecting at the east’ s receding wall
A film of what the day so far has done:
A wind that tries to scrape
The breaking waves up as they run
Across the bay
And shatter at the foot of Fluted Cape
In tern and gannet-printed veils of spray;
And trees the wind has caught,
Which seem too self-contained to sway
When they are blown,
And only move as a pleasing afterthought.
5 am. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.
A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight’ s
not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.
Last night it was snowing
and now
every path’ s a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls
at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.
Below, the season’ s
mean deceit —
that everything stays
white and clean.
It doesn’ t, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers
Whatever the cost I pay up at the minnow pools.
I don’ t know anything of the misery of these trapped fish,
or the failure of the marsh I’ m so hidden.
Up above is the island with its few houses facing
the ocean God walks with anyone there. I often
slosh through the low tide to a sister
unattached to causeways.
It’ s where deer mate then lead their young
by my house to fields, again up above me.
Pray for me. Like myself be lost.
An amulet under your chest, a green sign of the first
rose you ever saw, the first shore.
After it came in like a dark bird
Out of the snow, barely whistling
The notes father, mother, child,
It was hard to say what made us happiest.
Seeing the branches where it had learned
To stir the air? The air that opened
Without fear? Just the branches
And us in a room of wild things?
Like a shapeless flame, it flew
A dozen times around the room.
And, in a wink, a dozen more.
Into the wall, the window, the door.
