Midwestern

In the middle of December
to start over

to assume again
an order

at the end
of wonder

to conjure
and then to keep

slow dirty sleet
within its streetlight

Do nothing and everything will be done,
that's what Mr. Lao Tzu said, who walked
around talking 2,500 years ago and

now his books practically grow on trees
they're so popular and if he were
alive today beautiful women would

rush up to him like waves lapping
at the shores of his wisdom.
That's the way it is, I guess: humbling.

Rings possess fingers.

Fingers remember
what the eyes have

blocked. The blindness
in this

case is figurative.
The figure in this

case is
curvaceous.

)

Milled, folded,
soldered.

Inlaid omen.
Mokume gane.

Ifs as hinges.
Ands as pins.

Rings as
reunions.

)

In some remote
pre-dawn eye slit

the horizon largely
the same

the cinquefoils still
chirpy and obliging the ox-eyed

Sleepless
in the cold dark,
I look
through the closed dim
door be-
fore me, which be-
comes an
abyss into
which my
memories have
fallen
past laughter or
horror,
passion or hard
work — my
memories of
our past
laughter, horror,
passion,
hard work. An ache
of be-
ing. An ache of
being,
over love. An
ache of
being over
love. Like
projections on
the screen
of the heavy
window
curtains, flashing

I’ m sitting at Nathan’ s, reading a biography of Darwin
who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle

“no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”:
he’ ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported

by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years.
Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”:

those philosophical poems of William Bronk’ s. What’ s
most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten,

Reckless and white as a flashlight beam cast
into some dark corner, the moon
insists on the deeper blackness

surrounding it. Perhaps it wishes
to be a woman or a window,
cushioning everything, full of itself

for the moment, yet frightened, like any egotist.
But still the stars patiently insist
on their presence, pinholes to nothingness.

When else would I walk on such a night in the world?

Startled from snow-day slumber by a neighbor’ s mutt,
it banged its buzzard’ s head then couldn’ t solve
the problem of the white pine’ s limbs
with wings nearly too broad for a planned descent.
Somewhere an awkward angel knows
whether it was dead before it hit the ground.
Any sinner could tell it was dead after —
eyes unseen beneath bare and wrinkled lids,
feet drawn up almost as high as hands.
I loved to watch thistle and millet
disappear beneath it in the yard.
As snow covers feathers that will still be

So won a name in this place,
handing off lath strips to a hammer's
measure, seeing the passing girls' slits
in roils of timber grain.

Mountains, barley, scaffold,
dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly
from the hoods of faraway bells
monks emerging like hairless animals.

At times they will fly under. The dome
contains jungles. Invent a sky under the dome.

Creatures awake, asleep, at play, aglow:
they float – unbottled genii – under the dome.

Southern Belle, a splash of black, dusted with gold,
dissembles, assembling, acts shy under the dome.

Cattleheart, Giant Swallowtail, Clipper:
sail, navigate sky high under the dome.

Like confetti – a wedding – bits of Rice
Paper: sheer mimicry under the dome.

Magnificent Owl, in air, a pansy,
it feeds, wings up, eye to eye, under the dome.

Because she died where the ravine falls into water.

Because they dragged her down to the creek.

In death, she wore her blue broadcloth skirt.

Though frost blanketed the grass she cooled her feet in the spring.

Because I turned the log with my foot.

Her slippers floated downstream into the dam.

Because, after the thaw, the hunters discovered her body.

Because she lived without our mother.

Because she had inherited head rights for oil beneath the land.

She was carrying his offspring.