Epistle from Elsinore

1
poem for the university of illinois

i.
would thou—

destroy the greeting.

we'll start sudden as
it goes. there is not
much left for poetry

to say.

ii.
i am standing
at the center of
the continent searching
out the university spires
of a midwestern lament.

do we breed our ghosts,

or do they arrive pre-
packaged from Shakespeare,
from Freud

until we are as unoriginal

as sin, standing in the white
sun of midwinter writing worthless
plays as impassioned as coal,
black eyes belonging to no
one to no
one to no
one at all

2
arizona and nevada

the bridge-poles bore

a large clock each, set an
hour apart as we drove
beneath the palpable heat

the sun too exploding

in consistency; it's always
this way here, everything
barren by design, the
red shape of immutable
earth stretched out in
inescapable patterns
against the span of air

and when we were halfway through

the time jumped itself back although
not one of us asked about it.
not much took a blink
to care or even
count it backwards.

the cars blinded themselves

against the hot lick of sun

3
banquo's ghost

of these snows the tragedy came

as if all the dissent of base utterance
coincided with northern currents

and we set the table one

mark off. When guests come,
dusted with bone-
white snow they turn
down their earthly gaze,
wondering

which of course dogs them,

follows us inside underfoot, nestles
close to our furnaced hearths

to the wilds we go, and

from thence we return, and
in the hushed lick of all our brutal stars

the table shudders,

as if under some
invisible weight

4
camus

i.
the sun makes murderers
so say the dead;

then does it also

pull up adulterers, thieves,
all the skilled evil that
lies prone when the moon
inhales out a layer
of thin cold and the
perforation of stars trail
out in jet-plane diameters?

ii.
in the basest argument,
the absurdity of being,
we stand bent beneath
the reddish glow, a rush
of humid breathing,

and so for this moment,

may it always be night,
as some small number
go home and do momentary
things that amount to
good.

5
Dante

i lived
long before your
knowledge, as pilgrims
must, but only forward
on your prescience. we
all read our makers before
they arrive, we know their
surnames, their
context

it is their eyes which

come last, a gentleness
kindred built in all that
they suffer

i lived
long before your
tortured path— half
between grey worlds
and then the stars which
come quiet,
but come still
when the journey's
through

6
macbeth's humanism

he'll impale himself,

this i can say, but i
do not for like
the scottish play, i
am staring only into
the dark of imagination;

we curse the same formation,

the same cluster of horrid
stars who present at night
sometimes, a trail of luminescence—

it might be fate,
strange voices carried
over the open wind,
but someone here
must stand prostrate
before this brave altar

he'll do it,
because i have
made this choice
already, too many times
to have it matter

7
one flew over the cuckoo's nest

they warned
me about Oregon.
or you did. doesn't matter
now. i'll never go.

i balanced between
the unpaved garden,
small scraps of hardy green
pushing out against the
gray calm of a late season
and the new-scent of tar
creeping up my
left shoe, over my
bare legs, down to
the low hem of my
blue skirt

you said i was irrational

but it was all right,
because you knew all of
those places, the locked ones
the blue ones the dangerous ones
where i would never go

8
poem for Kevin

in the skeletal frame

of conversation you
are fraught as a swan
landing on ice.

stand now.
the winter makes
you daring. as words
leap up in dry spidery
husks, the divine
fills in heightened
white the edge of your
broad span

until you crack beneath you

the refracted layers.

all is never forsaken.

the sky fades in a thousand
tones, a thousand melded
shades.

9
refute

the rain slickened

Asbury pier— like when
my grandparents were
young and everything
was all right, all blurred celluloid
all amusement park memories

although the prescience

of future hurt is enough to
spoil any portrait.

but all smeared developer’s

chemicals aside,
when i walked down
the empty sideways,
the cars still and deftly
wettened, i was in
an old instance of danger, blurred
as the photographs, my thin
jacket no shield against the salt-
sharp bite of the spit of the sea.

these places do not change

much, only bloom into darker things

10
saint

like patrick and the trinity

held placid in a green field,
I throw myself down to the
fecund grass, feeling all the
winter of life seeping out
to the wild stream that sing
and sing and in my blood
sing too.

deny our fathers;

they sleep on dark hills.

do not tell them the saint
returns, every seasonal pivot,
bringing a fist of clover above
the snakish eyes, dark and dark

hidden like
ancient bones

11
snake

they walked most of

the morning until the
sun rose fully strong against
the low tree-line

and within the dry

grasses something
old and dusky stirred.

the son grabbed his

father's arm. as a child
he had followed the
frosted trace of hidden
planes, imagining a stronger
hand, directing the path
of sightless trails;

his father is an old man now

the sounds of the wild do not
cause him mind, he merely
takes the blue shadow for being,
cocks his gun,

and walks onward

12
texas

i.
the houston wind
drove up a mouth-hot
werstorm along
the brown river spine

fraught in the seasonal

span. we build our bridges,
shore up our dams until
a morning when the river
wakes us

grinning and grinning,

beneath a roil of whipping
hydrocarbon foam

ii.
in texas there were weeks
lost and i was among the
effects. then
when i knew enough to return,
i began dreaming
of brown-throated rivers
and the heat pressed wet-wool against my bare skin.

13
train to iowa

when the rain

appeared black
over the tired
tracks the rusted
trains pulling along
towards the iowa
spans

he said to me
"there is nothing wrong,
this close to the end of
the earth" and he

was being perfectly

literal, but i was
young, and what the
hell did i know

all i wanted
was the rain
to stop, turn
to wind or snow,
or anything else, trails
leading back, a marker west
so when he left i would
know how to follow

14
central park

one summer
my brother and
i stood in the
center-fold open
calyx at the bulging city guts;
he was smoking
Marlboro red killing cowboys
and the sun peaked high
like it’s been doing although
we cannot say we
cannot say
it always will we have no
way to know; somewhere
stone and glass and green may
in turn live forever and forever
may live here beating in our
open hands, like when we were
children and nothing seemed to
change but the pattern of ocean
light, and father's smile;

we stood in the city's

sun, and the small birds
flocked up in great numbers
over the summer-dried
leaves

15
dream

cannot tread the accident-prone,

our automobiles perched charily
for winter's sect- and in the path
we take, making back towards
the holy woods, you hand-pick
some white blooms, so late in season

i say "it is good that we have

walked" and you do not say a thing
because as now it stands

all contact is made of ghosts. when I wake

up tomorrow I will start my car, make it wait
until the thermal vein runs along inside, opening
out for the cracked highway. it is easy to
imagine your pale tender eyes on the underside
of a psalm and at the first stoplight, the milky
blue eyes of the forest blinks, closes-

turns away

16
Dunsinane

do we leave our fathers before the gate?

they carry the first
taste of bone of mottled snow
clinging far inside this gutted dark.

Instead we are caught standing,

the faint humanistic wail clattering
across the open fields, and in our
hand we find the sharpened boughs

all of us, of women born.

still, unseat the king! from

the grinning dangerous stones
of the furthest wood, the
mossy lichens sprouting where
we shall not stand, we bring forth
the wood. does it matter at all where
our bones lie?

still the night wings cold across

the barren expanse.

17
last son

this rainy burden came

to his hands although he
had held nothing before,
and wouldn't after

except for a moment his

eyes grew light, and tender.
he remembered his sister's
face, pressed against the
window-glass, watching the
season bloom and spread open
as if a hand had parted the ways,
pushed aside the elasticity of bearing,
made a miracle of physics,
only for spite

but it passed. he took

a cigarette, didn't smoke it;
stared at it, slim and
quick in the half-light
dark of the afternoon,
drove on, denying not
his name nor his father
only that he belonged to
either

18
times square

all the written lexis

pays no heed; it does
not encompass the tangle
of city movement, it does
not even attempt to
level the head off a single
mass

and we pushed through:

the sun was leaning
heavy on the building
spires, son of architecture
also, like every being

ever dreaming, his eyes

fastened upwards, until
the steel metered a dazzle
of spring

and we cut through

the wonder, all it over-
coming, its language too

i said "see, at the end

of the street there is a
blossom of permanence
it is a singular kind; it
lives for us"

and he laughed,
pulling down his
battered cap "we
live for everything"

he said

19
Oedipus on Cedar Avenue

what tangled
industry wept
at the mountain-
side where
some brilliant
man stabbed his
sight at finding
an answer.

now on the
ocean-tide, Oedipus
gains a few
troughs dug under his
dark wrecked eyes,
smokes cigarettes,
curses his children
through empty tears.

now when
we are
walking through
the autumn dark,
he says to me
"only ask the question
do not probe the
irritable seer for
perhaps they
may have
the answer"

i tell him with my

childish eyes that
Tiresias was a woman
for a time. snow
will fall later. all
time comes to more
time, until it is
the circle the gods
have been saying:

their own circle,

that of feeble kings

20
ohio ii

the one fantasy i allowed was simple;

i thought about taking
you home-not my own- only
over the span of road, half-hour
at the most, but yours, and
even in charity i stood selfish

i wanted mostly
to see you in the
white late-winter
of an open country,
the fields stocked for
blooming when the time
came, everything placed
within the lick of distance, and
i wanted the nights to
fall in a shocked suddenness,
with you wide-awake and
speaking, a starry host
quoth some forgotten poet

what home was really, i will not know-

it was never yours, now that i think
about it, not yours or mine, but
some place together, beautiful and
ephemeral, like most of winter, and
even spring

21
hunting

grandfather drank the wildness

from his broken lips- we found

him once in the woods, half-

dead with a new-fallen snow

about his mangled frame. now

we celebrate our tragedy. when all

the modern explanations emerge,

purported by some well-meaning

brute, we shrug and turn back to

the essential truth burned black in

pain, grandfather out hunting still

chasing through the deepest winter

the feral stags, their hooves pounding

hard against the mottle ground.

it is in our blood,
we say.

and we are content

with it.

22
this small poem

i cannot ask
a thing of him

not now
anyway, except sometimes

i think of vienna,
where my father
promised his unquiet bones but still,
i stay silent.

my voice will be found;

this i can assure.

but right now,

my father’s ruin can grab hold,
go on without a semblance
of wit, a struggling voice

i am lonely,
but not of myself.

i can not ask a

thing of him, although
i know he would open

the city gates,

late at night when no-
one will see,

and i would abide,

i have-
i always will

23
horatio thinks on the story

when he was left

alone, his hands
dried over as the
scene shifted, panned
out to brave Fortinbras
lording over the procession,
he turned his back to the
bier. he'd seen enough.
and later that night,
when the moon filled
itself again an empty
chalice outside his
rude-cut window pane,
he took a pen to his lip,
tapped his mouth absently,
and decided the Romans
were cowards in the end-

death came once, for any lucky

prince. still, he straightened himself
against the midnight
span, and began to write.

it came from nowhere,

and all places, and the hoary
ghosts trailed pale mist along
the forest rim

24
at a Midwestern university, remembering

the desert kings are banished

now, their descendants dark-
eyed to the central plains
reminiscent of red sand
but turned to moiling wheat
as it passes beneath the
cloud banks, patches of open blue,
stark white.

and he stands at the small

pond flanked by brick buildings,
the perfect outline of skeletal
trees and the bleak sky hard-
pressed against that hidden part
of him which feels ever-warmth.

inside his lungs the smoke

wreathes, buries, coughs out;
he says he has not been home in
years, but the ocean is far away
now and he sees it is a different
home, one among ruined cities
that shudders within, cries
to breaking, he understands all the
hidden horrors, all the screaming
midnight ghosts, which tear
at a history he is privy to

only at the base of thought.

"God punishes", he recites, but

still he does not
know what it
means.

25
academic letters

when we spoke, we covered

writing, and it was a short
conversation

he told me to be careful
not to descend
into an aesthetic
prison, how everything
would matter then and
it was not supposed to,
that the bad writers
were fit to study history,
to document structure—

it was what he did best,

and he was very bad at it.

i laughed,
because there
was precious little he
understood, but
he was trying,
and that mattered
too, in a different
way

26
Beowulf (another song)

i.
he mourns latin

but that is instinct.

out over broken fields
the marble is cracked
and long bleached by
sun and weather; our common
deities nip at his heels
clad in not steel not the
frightful steel of a frozen
hinge but leather, but earth.

do not speak of this tongue

he cautions.

do not speak in questions.

ii.
when night comes after the winter has spread thin its piercing clasp, threaded
as weaving iron all cold to breaking, the ancient map of sky close and throbbing
back to where memory is foreign in frightened

modernity

he constructs his verse with harsh pattern

that speaks to the brown fecund earth

as alive as parametric as the fallen numbers stained with

not a softened bone, not an overlapped excuse only the epic brutality hidden
high in his hard hands

write these songs,

caution the quiet things:
write these songs.

do not leave us as unknown horrors. we still live beneath you.

27
scene

they were playing guitars,

throwing out a spread of
sound that purported
unison, only a hint
discordant, and the night
tapped the glass, turned
hard by january shaped
ragged into tree-root and
bare sky, and they played
until the day turned one-
half-hour past, until the
light burned from misplacement.

it was late,
and nothing
was supposed
to be so alive

28
burden

he think of drowning,
though not his own.

the half-finished library stands stark

in the new season,
behind it utterly white, the mid-
morning sky fraught tension
with broken trees torn between
raucous crows,
cuneiform shades against the white.

nothing speaks of absurdity

as well as the quiet volumes that
fall thickly to the broken path;
and the drowning still—
as all the lovely voices seem
to, Ophelia in the brackish
pool, the secret pacts made
with some canonical devil,
who proceeded the whole desperate
matter—

still, he weathers the cold,

pulls close his coat, and
walks the stairs, the white
sky overhead and done in
thirds, through the building, the
trees, the blackbirds;

he has classes to teach,

about the sadder ghosts
those who perched disconsolate
on river-sides, the water lapping
beneath,

a language that will

not be mastered-

the last language to

learn

29
McCarran airport, Las Vegas

the heat eased down

his hard eyes, made the
dark liquid, a transition
phase, uneven by the fuel-
heavy afternoon and he stood
outside the airport as the
desert threatened complacent
like it had for a million years
down the well-marked path
where some mechanic wonder
retracted in a shuddery huff
then tore out a flare of noise
and pressed up against the yielding
blue—

after all, the broke-toothed horizon had been doing the

same, he knew, only for much longer

30
Claudius

he stood upon
the veranda with
a heavy glass,
a sepulcher yet
of red shadow, that once
upon his ready lips would
burn and burn and inside
his burning ear (the cold he
said, damn starry host, the
cold bitten upon my lonely
face) a snake’s dried
bones sounded
as violent and pure
as what first life must
have been.

in the burdened copse

surrounding this pale
bastion—that, that is where
spirits moan up the hoary
moon; charily of night, he slips
back to sleep. beware the
dark of man, someone says

do not discount the queen

of heaven. she sleeps beside
him. of Hyperion bound, oh,
and when the son laughs his
fractal designs, this impervious
vessel stands again, at the forest
edge

thinking of throaty hounds,

his brother hunting the wild
deer, big and steaming along
the harlequin wood.

31
dues

at the stoplight, corner

of Lake Shore, my car
stalls suddenly, the heat
seeping out of the
open vents and i pause
not in any sudden outrage
but walking into the cold
of late morning
i stand beside the road, waiting.

providentially,
this is of small matter
the time remains out of
joint, as can be voiced

every day of my life,

i am returning a remembrance
every horrible moment,
i find myself further out
of the mottled wood,
until i can see the sun strain
weak and white over the unkempt
hills.

when my grandfather comes,

he will yell at me, cry out in
his harsh ancient tones

but i will laugh to myself. there

are dues left up from harsh hands
that pass on to our little tragedies,
but because we are real, we are
made to pay

32
ego at christmas

freud sang
out our pale hymns,
mother lit candles
and the poison plants
settled around their
length of decoration

while a crusade of flocking notes,

this music, a copper tone of weights
listing weary astride our broken
fences. something that does love
or at least the covered swimming pool
home and hearth that freud conditioned

mother, mother:
she comes
into me as I sit
beneath the window
ledge, chipping paint into
equal halves-

"and your id, does it live?"

"in the basement of my making

it is a faint windy man,
thickset, with eyes as dark
as a lunar eclipse, spread in
iron rings over the entire state
of Ohio"

outside winter blooms in some hoary groan,

the attic is cleared, and open the lucid vapor
of pure frost weaves about the bare wood. mother
makes certain we live in this house, pinioned in holly
and white

33
for Creon

this bears no protest;

i would have bent for you,
down ripping my knees
against the hard pavement

for you, all of this

i would have torn the
vault from its hinges,
small beneath the morning
sun

but you never asked.

so i go about the winter

no formal prostration sought,
no wounded spite rebuilt, in
the king's brutal death.

still, it is in my hands
if you were to have me
die, stretched along the
ancient way, i would have
done so.

see the Sphinx, she knows as well

in the end, my death
would be worth your
life twice over.

34
for Laertes

examine the rapier

brother, o, if this becomes
only of my death, then
come from the vault, a few
final flowers coiled about
the winter mud and the
hoary ghosts drifting out
across those horrid woods

i would have you

live for years yet, in
the princely shadow
of jointed time;
do not die to set it right

if the prophetic howl

from the restless ghost
impels a thought to
utter human tendencies,
if we are to believe our
shadows, do not uphold
the lie.

remember me with
flowers twined about my
dark hair; when i am dead,
i will no longer be lonely for
you, i will no longer be
lonely
for
any-
one.

35
interstate 70, indiana

the stars
came last,
like usual, and
always expected,
only not beautiful
because they fall
beyond borders and
classes and things named
in lieu of mystery
so that we might blame
our love for something
and over the dark
lethe of highway
he stuck his hand out
the window, cupping night
in a throbbing gasp,
so that it cut like
wind and was wind
in his opened
palm, for all the world
an offering, although
not much heard
and even little
was left for understanding.

he felt rain
then, cold
and portentous,
although it said nothing
except more rain
would come, and
the night would lie
thick on the backs
of the pulsing clouds

36
john the baptist

as the older child, he thought the world knew more

than it left in innocence, a gap wide enough to run
a river through. but some sacrifices had to come
and his would not be greatest.

it took years and years,

the red sun baking over
the constant hills, the rivers
receding, changing course,
and even the temples falling,
although in metaphor the quiet
lamb lived best confined to
the linguistic promise that transcended
any effect of stone

now, there is
a weak record

a thousand years hardly meant

much when he awoke beneath
the clearest sky running the
water through his cracked hands.

in the sun his

reflection was
ruddy, hard-
winded, a
kind and
ruined grin,
and for a
moment, it
would be all right
to drift to wind
among the dry
trees, to turn to
sand and be done
with it all-

paintings and poems and what else would most likely come

37
mccabe

he stands in the princeton lot paved past tiny

streams, past the decoration left paled
beyond season

and when he speaks it's

ugly speech because
he's learned little else
through the ice that
glints in his blueeyes
the eyes that

swear up evenings
white moon and broken
glass and punctured
tires and his teeth
bared as he stands in
the princeton lot,

fifty dollars on the game.

he stands by himself, an old
man grown older in promise, he waits
for my uncle to leave the hall, he
waits with his fists curved, sickle-
shaped in desperate
danger

38
ohio river

the brown river mud

laps up broken bridges
now as warm sputtering
stormfronts trace
the ohio spine
and somewhere between
the moiling fields of
bursting wheat and this
flooded lay, your dim
projection allows for sleep.

this is a land i know nothing

of, this covenant washed down
the traditional path but when
i dive down into the murky
stream the currents masking
my skin like the rising storm,
i am within your
dark— this, a river now,
of your coughing dark.

and on the furthest shore

you stand not full in form
but the windy composition
of weather and breath, the
condemnation of drowning,
as i raise my wettened head
above the water line, choking
down deep the brown water,
letting my hair flow full about
me, within still your
dark—this,
your dark.

39
pilgrimage

red cross
out on the desert line,
where the ocean has
come, and will

through this barren

place men have come
and come, until their
skin straps tight to
the thinning mass,
the guttural cry
across a darkened hunger

all for the mirage

at the glassy slope

when someone comes

far enough, there is a large
old tree, a tree bearing seed
but no fruit, the
fruit dried by small birds
and small eyed nightly
things, that
sing sometimes,
to the dark

it is not a disappointment
though. the red cross
perches still among
the dusty finches, and
the men who do
not die scattered back
towards the wind
not tripping over
the bones, not tripping
over the words they left
far and further

back where the water

runs true and clear
overtop their brown,
cracked hands

40
poem for richard

when he stumbled
down the mountains
of central Europe, it didn't matter:
not language, not theory.
he was nothing special,
just brave and fated;
in his father's eyes it
was luck, because a damned
country has to have some fortunate
children every now and again.

he grew quickly,
awoke in dangerous
places, awoke in
press events, the middle
of accounts, books and
words that didn't leave much
imprint, and once, when he
paused over a spit of
shadow, in a country he
wasn't quite sure of, he
even forgot why he'd come

but when night slipped— wherever

the hour— he'd sleep happy. he'd
remember punching the german boys
in gradeschool. it was a line of shame,
stretching all the way towards negation
and the next morning he'd have to
face the embattled catholics, the
ghostly thieves, the holy murderers,
grinning with a soulful candor
that left him uneasy, beneath
fifty-eight years of pure
surface

41
poem for richard ii

"i hearken back to the draw of blood

it's what they taught me, growing up lonely
on the city miles.

no one ever expected me to go home, however,

they all thought i would die, alone too along
the jungle paths

and sometimes, it would be better for them to

think that. now, i have seen Belfast at evening-
tide, drawing down the smokey hills, the muffled sob of
a language i struggled through, and would father
have found, stumbling past the steel shavings, the
relics of saintly glass, his own face, staring with
damned lovely rage

my face is his own. when he

sent me to europe the first time,
i felt the whipping cold of the
mountaintops slice into my
upturned palms.

i would feel this way again"

42
returning to Elsinore

many miles passed before he found the pathway, led

up the winding hill which grew more and more to stone
as he passed, and the trees became skeletal things,
broken off in some perpetual pain as if the italian
hell had bled out by truth and came
to the darkest parts of the earth.

he knew the forests

the broken lakes and the
familiar lay; it came naturally
to the dark, his eyes flowering out
white and thin as the
air narrowed against the
spine of the mountains, and
finally there was the brooding
hulk, animalistic almost as he
stood in the final way

he reached about in his traveling sack and found

some wrinkled piece, an open scrawl that might have
come to more, had night not fallen suddenly, and the
wilds erupted in cold sounds, dangerous and close to home.

43
ghost

must we flounder,
with imagination? place
us on the immutable
heath, let us scent
the bones growing
grim beneath our
planted wood

in the grey eyes we find

our own holism;
it does not stand formally,
perched by mirrors

instead with blasted erudition,

it rides the weather-fronts
down from northern countries,
all flocked, backs shaped to
the rim of the world.

we are in the end

beholden to the
specter returning.
if not for haunting,
we would have no
sense of mind.

if not for the prison bars scratched

across the livid stone, we would not
know that we are human, and live,
all exiled out to the furthest land,
until we meet our fathers

to find they have left words for us:

letters, and messages
and words

44
boy

the river touched him when he was small,

scraping his hands on the cracked bed, the dried
bank expanding always in a heat death wave of
dream:

and when the weekends came, he went upon

the town walls, stretching his arms up and up
until the bricks baked beneath his open grip

and along the desiccated roads small children

cried, running off to the darker holes lined in rooted teeth;

years later, he stood on the broken shore

of a cold and novel place limned sick,
where the rivers bloomed with ice, and spilled over, come spring.

like a boy he followed the carved gates, the heavy walls, running
his hand alongside

dreaming of the dry secret

hurt that nursed itself along
canyon beds, where the dark
of the uncultured wood ran
rife, and cried out in strange
sounds, as the sun bled out
across the broken line

45
Voice

the sea-light bounded

refracted
all the myopic purview of
landscape reflect
this juncture of light
and we stand coquette
as you stare
and as you hate me now,
you hate
me as I come from the desert
with my honey with my
knitted wasps
with my white
linen—

as passion-
play, we stand. I stand.
I do.

in some voice you shall hear me

in the gray light of some sharpened
city you shall hear me, small as I am
and wet against the pale frost,
my voice transcending
up through the mottled woods,
the white blooming
shore you shall hear me.

do not frighten off

the empty swan; she
too leans beneath some
holy lie as her own kind
transformed in clouds
of godly blue, a man with
dark eyes and dark hair
and a hateful grin. he
had come to do and had
done and yet

in some voice you shall hear me.

46
mottled

in the mirror i fell

it was clouded and ghostly
a rather sepulcher sense,
but i would have never said
not to you at least

and a few weeks ago again

i found myself in front of
a similar surface, dappled
in age, and the sun skimmed
between the slatted blinds this time,
instead of the heavy whisper of
frozen rain through the open
vent

your voice came,

as i knew it would. it
came with sick intonation
i saw the fields of Ohio,
the ones you rumored
as i once might have,
thousands of miles overhead,
and i shifted my weight, feeling
against my bare leg the
sudden sting of seasonal cold

47
Wilson's pet cemetery

i.
later summer was
worse: the September set,
when the sun still stroked
long thin lines of red
and red, colors between
but of no other name and
the stunted trees glared
odd against the fall; then
everyone knew; in passing
they looked away, or straight
ahead. best not to think about
it. there were ghosts enough,
and none so close, so twisted by shape
and corporeal enough as to share leaf and vein with
other bodies.

ii.
i learned first of all in the dark, between
seven tall trees spread apart by thin determination.

he said to me, he buried their bones someplace

no one knows yet, no one says, but

they wake at night, small darkling eyes
blurred so that the stars might find their forgotten
daughters

among the things of movement, although not the last dry crickets,
the cry of ordinary beasts.

i wanted to
say, i knew
where, and he
knew where too,
but the pact we
keep with this
spider whisper keeps
only in silence

48
shadow lawn

i.
where the trees opened one could expect the road leading
off and hot-black even to the ashen sky, but there was an open
stream, small yet but still a course of itself, and geese flocked about
the sloping grass.

one could see this from the western half,

down into a cleared path. everywhere else
was more of the same. The sun sometimes. rain.
the darting shapes of
small birds.

ii.
do we mourn the stillness of expanse, of land, or does it mourn us, as we breathe
down against the hard plane. our blood must move, ever, ever—
it must

and breath.

only growth bears

acquaintance

iii.
in the glance of evening, they walked along the smoothed
way, bordering along the field, and they didn't speak much,
except when she shifted her eyes out left across where the
moon put on a perspective course, meeting the end of the grass,
which did not end, only narrowed to the stream and geese, the
barren rim of poplar, of ash and he said

"would you turn to me, probing?"

she only smiled. it was lost. The white lidded moon had more important
things to halo

iv.
the first planners were about context
when they sat together in stuffy coats, when
outside the wind moved snaking about the
bluegrass, up to one's thigh in places. they
said it would be best, if all were left to course,
and agreeing it merited well, they shrugged off
the rest of the afternoon and went to drinks, to
walking. and as they walked past the promise, a strange and

49
long call came out from the span, and they shuddered,
but said nothing, only noted the sun as it
hung perilous against a flat spread; all the land
was the same, until they could not see for the burn
of red.

and one thought of trees. a university

dappled, wettened, drowned, about the lawn, and trees,
demarcation, safe within the edge. a stream
perhaps. forged perfectly, and natural.

50
the colonnade

i.
there were two trees and in season
the yellowed grasses angled the stony
plane against the marble glare, the roots
entangled useless, gasping up the last
cup of rain, and outside
the blooms sat in wait, all was still for some
moments- and moments meaning
time, time in flight, the winter
expanding like pavement, until
the fissures pounded in completeness,
all the capillary trends filled to bursting
with the promise of growth

ii.
in the dry space of stone, king david remembered his youth

before architecture, winter,

before any semblance of
history pressed to his throat,
feeling hard and thick, and much
like speech would, if there
was nothing keeping it

king david—
he was an erudite
weakling, a brave
mirage rippling with
imagination and thin
against the shade of night,
which fell quickly, and
came cold-handed across
the shadow lawn

iii.
these hallowed fields so filled in expanse see
the length of sun, tear blind down the grassy row,
see it against the pale of endeavor, a building here,
and in the cleft of dark, the fountains whispered,
left off for the frigid months.

blackbirds moved,
cuneiform backed against
the bear trees

51
iv.
a girl paused by the brush, her hands trembling

she bore the fruit

of acumen. it lingered
ripe from her parted lips.

boys passed.
they saw her legs
bare against the winter
dawn. she had troughs dug grey,
and dark eyes, and
saw faint winded
licks along the building
side

where there’d been water damage

and the streams rustled,
turned blind refraction
to unsought steps, where
oh, say, even kings approached.

kings imagined.

the girl walked away, her back

pulled in shadow, the sun through
edifice, her skirt around her
legs.

boys watched.

52
sculpture garden

i.
all said, it bloomed with intent, even at midnight,
when no one moved across the way, blackbirds
paused over the dreary stone, and rain fell
when it would but that was an unconscious
gesture, and strictly without meaning

the rust settled benign as a clock, symbol stretched

for the students pausing with open pads, dreaming sometimes
of what prompted movement to make, and movement itself,
although that too meant nothing

ii.
there was
a dark pond
of stone that
had been crafted,
a horrid thing in
that term a fish
alone and dark too,
eyed then to the bowl
of sky which tipped
overhead, sometimes
too bright to bear, other
times broad and stroked
night in hue, and the
fish was not quick, nor
shy, it did not hide about
the mottled shadow,
it stared up and when
the sky was low enough,
its unconscious mouth
pushed the surface tension
the strange physics of
water until the air washed
sweet and poisonous over
it, and nothing was alone
then, not sky or water,
not the fish, not the elastic
demarcation stretched
intently across the
small space.

iii.

53
she was
walking

and it was
night

and Saturn
paused low

and fat over

the last

lick of winter
and her

shoes scattered
the gravel

path and she

almost cried

out at the
statue of

a blue heron,
poised and

ready and
half-covered

by unruly
brush

iv.
these were stables once; ancient pastures,
detailed too in purposed. now time has
created intent and the creation too, it has
bloomed along the lines of season, when
the flowers cultured along the uneven
path come to open, although of no progression,
no clock that glowers downward, interrupting
the progression of sky and weather.

54
a poem for you in winter

i.
i remember everything,
and perhaps we even said
this— you and i of course,
when we spoke.

now we rush past one

another, always caught up
in the colonnade, the open
fountains, the whitened sky.

it is not your fault

that i have nothing left
but to remember. in fact,
very little is your fault;
the melancholy clock tones,
the flock of iridescent birds
papering the bare trees with
transient forms.

ii.
i would say for you not to worry.
i have never hurt myself,
never, except perhaps tripping up over the perforated
ice, leading back towards the shadow lawn, the
detailed sculpture; all things i have seen half-pressed
against the broken ground. but you do not worry.

for this,
i should be
be thankful

iii.
the sculpture garden moves past midnight, everyone who sees it can swear—
now as the sun draws up full to its winter height, my friend and i walk past the tangled
boughs, past the brackish water, and within the silent fish sieve out the bleak clouds

my friend says "is there anything

left for you— i mean, left to understand,
or forgive?"

that will come later when i walk through a garden i have not committed to memory

55
epistle from Elsinore

for all we never understood, it's still a cold country.

you said first, bring
sweaters, bring thick coats,
bring the dogs even, if they'll follow.

i kept your paths only because

you asked and because it was
the wrong thing to do, but anyway,
you never had a set course in
responsibility; what others said
i purported, told you when the time
came, and gave you my own words

a small question that might have mattered,

had i come back sooner.

but this is something you will not read

we've passed all the words we care
to. now the fields have cracked
in ice, the stone even opened
small veins for the strands of
cold. on the battlements I uncap my pen and watch the sun
stand thin and pale against the sharpness of sky and
wood and the empty lakes opening
like whitened eyes;

the ghost has come a few times, although

he never speaks to me

i am not afraid, because everything has already

been written, and after the spring dawned close
to your dark windy eyes there isn't much left that
may happen

that is why i am here,

although i cannot say
why i am telling you

56
for k., on his dissertation

there is a lot i would alter for you:

the smoky disposition of
midnight lolling off on
your uneven speech,
or your music, which i cannot say i have ever heard.

but far off now, at the height of season,

your words greet the largest span
and i stand in my wool coat
out against the broad strength
of road and land and i know that every adverb stood
a stark struggle for you, every
sullen noun, contrary tone leveled in linguistic
revival

still, it's of great importance,

the end hiding poetic in the
great and sweating means, where
maybe the stories of your grandmother
were birthed in a language i did
not even know existed

and of course i would pour over every vein, every bleeding

capillary that peters out to a stab at digression,

but you've probably wept for this;

you've probably wept,

and i am as far away from you as i ever have been

because it has always been easy for me.

57
refutation

i.
"this,"
"is what one
does"

and with words one

one
one more to three,
the numeric miracle of unconscious symbolism,
undivided as you

in quiescent material call out

winter, between birth and end,
when all will come to bursting

what one does

is not what I do,

I will say
later.

ii.
four starlings sit impervious
to wind, twined around stone expression
in some mock-versailles all in struggling architecture

I would for you paint out the oily

grins of idealists, sycophant assistants typing
up great works of art, mathematically aligned,
and tyrants and hobbyists doctors priests

all within scope, small winded three-part plan

sketched over the complex catastrophe that
stands wielded by cherubic stillness

"this is not what I will do"

I say.

all bred, all born, all meandered finally, all, all

do we come to this? standing fully in the white
sun scaring down the brave

as bright as air

58
iowa (two poems)

i.
(king)
he shaped Claudius out, as if
an actor had been born but
there was no imitation, not in
life or art, or even drink, when
he quoted Renaissance poets,
that quartered lonely lots only
in his hidden mind

what he gave was abandoned

an avatar of Eros even,

if the shades languished
back, as far as he imagined.

when winter broke, he turned

to me and said "it is best, driving
in iowa, when there is no one around"

he said nothing
about who i would
be, forlorn across the
broad highway, seeing no
lights as the evening cleaved out
over a violent storm, and now
he is murmuring lonely by the sea-
side, writing out imperfect
sonnets.

ii.
(carpenter)
it is amazing how
the weather shifts
with no forward
notice.

do not mask for me all that i have done.

it will make me cry someday, to understand

that when the prophet's name
the lonely son,
the forgotten father lolled over
a foreign tongue, he had walked

59
those fields as well, the grass
patterning unconsciously his
tread, the guilt had already bloomed

i will never
be the girl
who grew
pale flowers,
for his path into
the city

but then he drove too those empty roads, and shapes

no epithet of all human folly. the singular motion allows:
i do not love him,
and i have found finally a state
of my own, over the nameless towns,
over the university spires piercing up
the white winter sky

60
university of northern iowa

you watch
the girls play
ball, but
the sputtering
closeness burrows
down into the cleave
of your throat and
you leave and pull
hard the clutch
back, set the
car forward
in a dull thud
of complaint while
the roads are trekked
deep in weather, and on
either side there is
nothing, and you
remember why
you left, although
you do not recall a thing
about coming back,
not about home,
because the crests of
rounded hills stretch
as far back as the
shadow of your
hand and when you
speak about the ocean
it is like you are
telling the blind how
to paint- it's all a mess,
the colors misunderstood,
and spread about without
a word of sense-

it turns to night,
the veldt of winter,
perforated with
those damnable
hosts-

you feel
small, and
you still

61
cannot breathe
past the hard
cleft of uncomfortable
heat perched just below
speaking, submerged
even, as if the
sea has followed, the
sea and everything else
that does not belong,
a dark-haired girl on
the edge of land, which only
builds on to more land,
and more

62
matthew

winter paws
lonely at the glass
pane door, nestling
up to the swath
of open light,
trailing out over the
frozen grass

but he has
red sand
beneath his
fingernails,
and brown leaves
tangled in his
untidy hair

just in of the wider plains,

of a place we are frightened of: but
he is brave; he says there is not much left
of fear when it lives quiet as season
on the ledge of heart

he cannot see
the lonely cold as
it breathes patterns
against the door-his
eyes have long since
broken in purpose,
dazzled still by
the salted sun,
left streaming over an openness,
far and long for one who spends
nights shaken, at having lived
past foolishness

63
beowulf (one song)

our verse stares us down

from fighting strains back
when the blood grew dark
beneath wooden boughs

so bury yourself in the softer tongues.

when the mirror takes

up a whitened moon,
and some fractal point
of perfect season echoes
all along the canyon bone,
it is with a guttural word
you may cry out

romance shatters in
the further latitudes.

64
starling poems

i.
these grounds
stand hallowed
to our reckoning.

we hallow them. all

is well. winter streaks
sharply the oscillating
streetlamps come
seven-o-clock, the
bells still ringing out
seconds past and
as we leap through
this hoary breathing

the quiet mutterings

weave out from the
still trees, small
black outlines stark
in

barren fortitude.

ii.
he stands frozen beneath the open face
of the clock building, his hands pressed
deep inside his coat, and for God's glory
he would forsake the dewy birth now as
December seeps beneath his papery skin

the stern immobility of white winter

brings stark the starry hosts;
he now feels them old

and angered. beneath his hand the

late shadow of a dark bird passes
without sound.

iii.
the earthbound cough
and stand in dark jackets
against the white of early
morning when fractured light
returns as virtue here

65
learning is twined among
the cancer, the veiled
eyes that live in stone corners

and amid the mock-versailles angels, stained

weak blue, amorphous flight carves a sharp
echo

iv.
i was walking
out my breath
pressed hard
against my
bare skin and
when i passed the
sun strained through
broken trees that
bore some forgotten name,
i found dozens of eyes
startled in sudden
wordless outrage, then
i was alone against
the transient pattern
of being.

66