Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.
Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.
Is there a sound? There is a forest.
What is the world? The word is wilderness.
What is the answer? The answer is the world.
What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness.
What is the end? No one lives there now.
What is a beginning? The beginning is light.
What makes happiness? Nothing.
What makes an ending? What does not.
What is her skin? Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies,
of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full
The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe
all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours
in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash,
a reaction sending out runners across her chest,
a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back
into fashion, their son coming back
from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime
and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger
spread down the long hallway of their house
and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’ s doubled
The first person in recorded history
struck by a comet slept on her couch
across the road from the Comet Drive-In
and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee,
and woke her. Everything that hurts
hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary
on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated
that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built
so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent
like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm... Here
The blue booby lives
on the bare rocks
of Galápagos
and fears nothing.
It is a simple life:
they live on fish,
and there are few predators.
Also, the males do not
make fools of themselves
chasing after the young
ladies. Rather,
they gather the blue
objects of the world
and construct from them
I hid the deed:
— would my life end?
The grackle called it back again.
The grackle then
became
my life. A swan’ s neck
curling to ask
what if
uncurled
to reachinto the reed,
It was the blind girl from the rez who
stole the baker’ s missing bread;
it was the guitar playing fool who crooned
and raced the wild mustangs through our heads.
It was the village idiot who played
his chess without the fool, the bowl
of soup who said too late, too late, too late
to blame the thread, the spoon, the text, the mole.
Beside the waterfall of fallen things
just east of town, it was the bearded man
attaching fallen things to angel’ s wings
while singing legends to the long, long grass.
He startled to see a statue of blind
justice really did loom over the courtroom. But
remained determined to scorn symbolism.
She needed a quarter to call her lover —
the docket was full, she’ d be late for lunch —
and he gave her one. It was not a taunt,
acquiescence, wager, or plea. It was
a quarter. The fact that they had done this —
even this! — together and cordially,
Each morning in the little white cabin
by the river they woke to a raccoon
clawing under the floorboards or banging
in the wood stove. They did not discuss this.
Instead they said it was a perfect day
to pick blueberries on the hill, or that
a hike to the old glassworks sounded good.
