1

A place you would be

familiar with, birds,

trees, men & women, world

declaring itself

moment by moment

The mountain, the distance,

the cricket’s emergence,

flick of a grasshopper,

blue jay & crocus, is

or is nearly the whole

The words a country

of leaves on the field,

city of wheat to come to,

landscape glimpsed

through flashes of lightning

And moving. Their carts

creak by the fence

to where they will move

in a circle slowly,

speaking the names

Draw near the well,

the last water.

I bring my flesh

to your flesh,

a place we shall live

2

Return of the earth

to itself

like water, here

is no future

lady walling your face

to desire, gentleman

under the helmet,

the grasses take you

away from all this –

thistleburrs, pines,

morning-glories,

mashed into dollar bills

Schools full of silence,

the blue eyes, sober

grey suit, clipped head

would assure us

The day of the last

clean wind off the plain

and the lake

full of shit

The deer stand

at your whistle, come down

from the wood

to their own country

He hides down there

by the women’s house.

She writes poems

full of gesture

She has no desires

to speak of

                 O friend

I would write you

you would not believe

3

Of the mountain,

what country we came,

he said nothing

Spoke of rooms of tall grass,

Foxtail & Brome, the spread

of the Queen Anne’s Lace,

a ribbon of birds dipping

& rippling, going away

wheeling its nebula –

the way we would go,

wind crying direction

yellows through maple

Described the cicada’s

brief time, a few weeks

it’s over: birdsounds,

shiver of aspen, briars

on stones, ripples

the summer field has

as through this she walks

step by step, her skirt

printed with corn-ears

swirling, she pivots herself

to one foot, in the glass

reflects she was young

4

We are among resonances,

bones of the skull

Tiny plates of the ear

move on each other

Though I speak to myself

I speak also to you

We shall burst into silence,

we shall rise from our mouths

What I have spoken of

speaks of itself:

the river over stones,

the grass repeating itself

If I’m drunk & can’t see

I shall get home

Walking the street of myself

to the door, I shall go in

I will enter the dream’s trick

to believe in itself

Where we are we belong,

here or another place

How the tree speaks, talks

of a fox passing through

The peewee’s cry instant

by instant discovers itself

What a cry of solitudes,

sounds across water

What a small sound in which

to begin to complete myself