Wilds 9780520937581, 9780520240414

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1
2
3
4

Citation preview

THE WILDS

NEW

CALIFORNIA

E D I T E D BY

POETRY

Robert Hass, Calvin Bedient, Brenda Hillman, and Forrest Gander

For, by Carol Snow Enola Gay, by Mark Levine Selected Poems, by Fanny Howe Sleeping with the Dictionary, by Harr yette Mullen Commons, by Myung Mi Kim The Guns and Flags Project, by Geoffrey G. O’Brien Gone, by Fanny Howe Why/Why Not, by Martha Ronk A Carnage in the Lovetrees, by Richard Greenfield The Seventy Prepositions, by Carol Snow Not Even Then, by Brian Blanchfield Facts for Visitors, by Srikanth Reddy Weather Eye Open, by Sarah Gridley Subject, by Laura Mullen This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, by Juliana Spahr The Totality for Kids, by Joshua Clover The Wilds, by Mark Levine I Love Artists, by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

THE WILDS MARK LEVINE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2006 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levine, Mark, 1965 – . The wilds / Mark Levine. p. cm. — (New California poetry ; 17) isbn 0-520-24040-5 (cloth : alk. paper). — isbn 0-520-24041-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) I. Title. II. Series. ps3562.e8978w55 811'.54 — dc22

2006 2005016387

Manufactured in Canada 15 10

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Emily

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments i x

1 Ontario 3

3 The Wilds 41

Quarry 5 Bering Strait 6

4

Grade Three 8

Song 49

Arboretum 9

Belongings 50

Two Women 11

Early 52

Document 15

Poem 53

Then 16

Child’s Song 55 Night 57

2

Autumn 59

Hand 21

Refuge Event 60

Dock 23

Song 62

Habitat 25

Willow 64

Animal 27 Insect 29 This Day Last Year in Yellowstone National Park 31 Nurse 32 Rent 34 Triangle 35 Remember 37

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

My thanks to the editors of the journals in which these poems have appeared: Boston Review, The Canary, Colorado Review, Cutbank, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Jubilat, The Literary Review, NEO (Portugal), Pequod, Ploughshares, Tin House, Underwood: A Broadside Anthology, Volt, and Washington Square. My thanks to the series editors for their support and input. My thanks, also, to James Galvin.

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1

Ontario

Beauty in its winter slippers approached us by degrees on the gravel path. We were hitching a ride out; had been hitching. Our suitcase freighted with a few gardening tools lifted from the shed while the old man, old enough, looked away. He who went fishing at night (so he said) carrying in his pail a nest of tiny flame. We were headed, headed out, we were going in a direction. No tricks or intrigue, just a noisy ineptness. If that’s a word. Beauty, dipped in resin beneath its shag, was always ready with the right curse to recite to our nature. It is in us, it is, in the smokehouse in the woods and the old man

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looked away. Song of experience. There were treads in the snow. We waited for our hitch. There were train tracks which stung with clods of this region’s rare clay. We were boys, boyish, almost girls. Left alone on the roof, we would have dwindled. Incrimination called to us from the city and its fog-blacked lake, called to us from the salvaged farms beyond the lake, from the wilds beyond that. Guilty was good.

4

Quarry

The patient climbs down his sinkhole hand over hand, impatient. Look. No hands. Nor fingernails, nor maternal lamentation, which has been cut from the composite. On his doorstep the milk crate, old garments shielding from sight a delivery a guise. It’s about price. For if the fenced-off quarry, drenched in oxidation’s hundred hues, is a negation . . . Nightbirds roost on its ledges. Fox has been seen there. Families roll their used-up animals down to its chalky pond, whence issues, in time, the sound of the sound of a ping. I am after that echo which he has produced. It is a dense thing, water soluble. It can, for a moment, be got out. My guide: don’t back off.

5

Bering Strait

Judging a man by his state-issued shoes in all latitudes cut just below the knee seeming to float as the sky floats over the tundra a scab of lichen hugging the black rock lyric repeating itself in him he stitches his kite to the updraft for wings and the sea rears beneath its lid of misshapen ice toward a magnetic limit washed by a tide holding on for a bit like a seeming sailor riding a cleaved keel lyric instructing his raft binding a few slats squeezing rainwater from his wool dredging dark bony fish underneath adrift in nutrient rich doses of remembering a city between two rivers above drained wetlands besieged

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in the marching song the day crisp with transfiguration nets rake the shoreline with him threshers clear the field with him unmindful of the carbon beds his heels sticky with sighting land his refrain the hero’s need to be unloved.

7

Grade Three

Tuesday. Must be pencils. In the hammered toolbox marked “Made in Japan.” The classmates are envious. Class is all a lesson in belts gone dizzy among exploited magnets. Children: who among you would not like to roam the glade over with its varied plant life and rotaries? But first the revolution. Tuesday. Must be piety, fresh snowflakes, rural tradition, pencils. The classmates are evidence. One to a tab furnished locally of materials oppressed at the loom. Fingers sewn together with air in the monetary quarry. Rhyme-and-a-half. Much preening required. But first the revolution.

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Arboretum

What would be revealed to us children in the arboretum in our melting bootprints wintry clay birds on their mounts while we follow the string on our wrists? Many surviving replicas from the forest of wood products congregate in pleasing postures by which to document the germinating soil and so on said the guided voice. For instance the Japanese cut-leaf maple outcome of laborious grafting subject of a sequence of awkward relocations and experiments with wilt and canker before finding its way to the display case. Eight intricate inches from root to crown its branches mature to the thickness of pencils its flower untouched by wind

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this dial adjusts its light adjusts its air chemistry. Are the insects correspondingly reduced to their grains is the wind of human breath an uninhabitable torrent what forms recline beneath the canopy where are the plowmen and soldiers the stars and their minions what redress? I heard him by the glass wall wielding his broom and following us to the waterfall flowing from a spout over polished pebbles pretending to sweep bent by knowledge of the divine collecting us at the exit.

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Two Women

1 There goes a difference between his mother’s death in the shallow woods by shots or hacking late autumn/winter tufted oak leaves framing her and His mother’s death of disease in the windless cube sipping from a bent straw beneath a cultivated willow crowding out the interior A difference.

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2 Something was inflicted. He was looking. The tiny cuts rained down. He wore an air of soiled gravity. Like a man on a child’s train. And yet as he lay on the tracks as per novelistic instruction (German steel; crows pecking, biding it) he awoke less visibly severed than he ought. Pearly love-bites by the dozen was all. He lay spanning and surveying (with the translator’s detachment) the undercarriage and its skittering high-gauge diagram, mosaic of pistons, drippings. And through the braying planks he viewed a scrim of scarved weepers shuttling by. Warm down there beneath the free-floating canopy. Wafts of mother’s bodily perfume, of dog hair.

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3 A gavel came down, a weight, a wand. Grouped us according to color. Selected us. Urged us to feel the special flush. Some of us (boys) pissing in stolen jars. Some of us swimming in a watering hole. Holding the breath. Swimming for breath. Swimming for the cord she trailed from the hem of her appearance.

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4 These two women will never meet. Your mother, my mother. My mother, your bride. My aster, my philomel, your crone, my vocalise. One map was hung in the other map’s place in the strategy room. The aspects marched on, in miniature, between two dry rivers in the yellow desert. Whistling, being whistled. Stopping only now and then.

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Document

They (the same ones) are to be got at by tilling a ground fretted with frost in which the speaker would place them. They are in it in winter wheat in inappropriate shoes scorned by farmers and arrayed in magnetic single file uphill. Birdless wind alongside them along implements and papers from the forge alighting. They (being got at) are cresting, puppetry, decampment, one leg crooked one leg brought down on the unpacking slope dulled by weather and hacked tree stumps and the picked-over remains of the pile and trod. Tunnels in the hill altering the hill without altering its shape. Hill drops away. Can you see the hill, you? It is here in the foreground a hunting hill. 15

Then

Thrift built us a shed out back in which to stow our set. I see a sky. A cloud with a carpenter’s hand in it. I see a shed an all-day affair with particle board and steel hinges. All of us standing at attention, feeling —my family and I— (and I was youngest, and we were all still there) like homeowners. Owning a yard. I see a fountain its waters reeling elsewhere. Then there were stairs to hide beneath with the wood-destroying insects. Look: I wasn’t that young. Had already done some of the worst moral things, and others. Yet we stood at attention in the shed at the end of that day among shelves and safety hooks and nearly marveled. There is, there is a moment before infiltration, is.

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I see a tool left out in grass like a new thought painted by night with efflorescence. I didn’t have to leave that place. I did. We all left. One at a time by different means (extractive/bitter/ceasing/yielded) and the owned yard softened at night. My father’s assignment was: last to go. What was that like when they peeled him from it. And pulled up the lawn by its handmade nails. And found a circuit of passageways laden with scrap. Which then was sold rather auctioned. As he watched, knowing. And how did he bear.

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2

Hand

Hand, where are your deeds? Tree hangs in its one-time blossoms toward your side of the property. Unseen hollows beneath your grasses and garments are presumed to be busy with detail. When you were in possession of the pods and pens and octagonal plots and your grappling hooks clattered in summer wind and you loosed the bitter petal when you, when you were . . . One smelled the matted feathers of the bird that followed you to school, one crushed the mustard powder in high season, one’s private medallions remained in the pouch beneath the chalkstone. Continue, one. You could wield a pick you could nail your boots to plywood with what the local tradesman called “instinct” you could shave light to a handful of grit . . . There you were, spooning syrup on a barely 21

visible winter day without context, one sharpened skate sweeping the makeshift pond, your print etched in the available layer and the scent of action on your cuff.

22

Dock

Have planted the annuals in cracks in the masonry of the old refinery a steady place beside the creek and watched the kneeling girl twist upward into shape a stem twined round her she is out of milk that flows from her in the song of spring each year she renders it into products that dampen the skin to sell or to offer to visitors arriving by riverboat from the opposite shore been a long tally beneath the diesel banner on her dock and have permitted no drifts of reconciliation to wear on me been sixteen years sixteen-year girl without speech pulling her stockings up when I am looking

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I have reckoned her wares the shoes we watched in the dance that afternoon thought thinks itself remotely on the hour and the quarter-hour the last ice-scraps of the month are washed downstream.

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Habitat

Hampered sky, unworldly, cleaving a stranger from me and placing her at my ear . . . What good moves inside her? She wears a theatrical scent like a language, a musk. On the furthest mound, the one cresting above the pond-formation, smitten with wings and throat-calls, there a child rises waving a forked stick white stick pulled from the ash tree’s leavings. It is the day after the holiday, child, time to start guessing. I have a self-regenerating habitat in a shoebox beneath my bed. As for the shoes (you ask) I’m wearing the shoes, a somewhat matching pair, laced, unlaced, not walking shoes, tramping shoes. And the rain falls, analogical, from a gas can,

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and the thumbnail foliage is thriving and drowning. And could the same not be said of me? Today when she woke (the stranger) and dressed herself she had gotten smaller and easier to neglect. Hence we set out to travel in strict formation, beneath the ivy-colored ivy-covered threshold.

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Animal

Animal in the wall answering daylight’s chemicals like a live animal, living. I get it. It is different degrees beneath the swarming coverlets beneath which orders are filled for a few dozen beings. Love tells them apart actually momentarily. Last week I saw a sleeper mouth where her seeing eyes should have been and a cylinder of breath like words. I watched her, planted there, old woman of herself, she was there. Last night the air changed and I was accompanied beneath the coverlets by

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sensation’s beads, its beings. Lay there touched. Got up and lay there outline full of me. Not a thought in the house, animal.

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Insect

The broken thing had two halves unequal but they sold it like that good grief. One half cut the skin of a cactus in my possession and the other half broken thing just lay there in me. I didn’t handle it much. Those fellows are growing there in the interior moon, priming and painting their nailheads and donning insulating rags. Little blossoms of survival, dust blossoms,

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dram of cooling vowels of farewell. Today I was feeling harmful. A songbird groomed itself for departure. Today I wore my courier’s belt of harm to self and other. The termite mound fashioned from mortar of the termite’s own making is fashioned in darkness by the blind termites around themselves and in its fortified center rests a finger-like agent. Without them the dead forests would lie in state being there in the forests unused. Are you from these parts? Must you be made from scratch? This one was laden with legs like a decoy crossing a farmer’s field. But where is the farmer’s feed? We set out. That is what we were set out to do.

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This Day Last Year in Yellowstone National Park

Did you lock up the seasonings? Did you know the day would fall out like this, like this unredeemed stub? Can you mend your mother’s habit? Grammar is a specialty. “While dressing his cock, she waved a splotched handiwork, emblem of the clan from which a wanderer descends.” She takes long barefoot walks when (decent, despiteful, demure) (derived, deciphered) (denuded, demoted, deactivated, demobbed) (deemed) and the tape loop shows her climbing a fence in Yellowstone National Park sans intuitive Indian guide and in comparison to herself she finds the geothermal output lacking. For she has glistening little bubbles on her skin. She frees herself from me in time. She picks a tiny arrowhead from her side. “I hate the taste,” she says.

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Nurse

Beginning in torments then on to coffee and sliced fruits in the cafeteria, nurse in the empty hallway sifting pints, liters, cubits, volts, cinders, creams, revenues, radon, her skillful stroking during interrogation recommending her, her shift ongoing, time-and-a-half, double time, on her feet and uncomplaining, now and then a pause to repair or change equipment, one patient then the next, then the prior one returns for touching-up, then two patients on a single circuit, then a ten-minute layoff for cigarettes mint tea chestnuts dental tools and if not for professional restraint you might confess a growing thing for her, your nurse, a grown thing, she stands austere in the corner of the room until summoned, then seems to materialize beside you on the hot slate tiles 32

with her tray, mopping your cheek with her glove, daubing her thumb in cloves and rubbing your gums with it, her digit in you like an organ, of course she is doing nothing standard procedure forbids (are we not all somehow lapsed in this together), conscience dogging you through the shift, you, your nurse, neutrality, then next round the scrubbers come in to fit the nozzles and blades and you are wheeled to a side room and adjusted in the bedding with her, not to get to know her—impossible—rather to examine the binding, the need binding you and your nurse in delegated roles, speaker, listener, voice, tone, murmur, electric wire, referee and referent, regret, rumination, rue, bound together for a breath or two or for another breath in the nursery’s ceaseless continuation.

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Rent

Unfitness: two walled rooms in a hut in the exposed elements with the riddling rims room for one but two would have to do compressing one in the other’s scudding mass owing to a lack of ownership gainsaid in the larder outnumbered

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Triangle

If not for the triangle accompanying my newborn to his father’s mother’s scheduled excavation I would have spilled him mistakenly down the banister where I ought to belong having squandered my grip elemental as my syntax was. I soaked my feet preemptively in the salt marsh while a heron done symbolizing tumbled toward grass at low tide. Then switching cadences I fastened an additional set of footprints in yellow snow as though you followed documenting our deeds beneath the awning of the pale green farmhouse by the sea where

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we did him in. The three of us made quite a pair of anxious experts forcibly removing his gills and other primitive appendages like feelers we pulled out. Do I understand you diverted onlookers with your talents for song-speech? Your meal lay wasting. A horse would approach you nuzzling wood chips from this year’s tree or cadence or memory-shrub. We recall you. As you were. Of our making.

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Remember

A thing or two about changing a wheel in a steady rain about an outcry our lorry made hauling figs and hardware to the hillside retreat about the water supply reversing the waterwheel wordplay taken for swordplay two or three things about matchsticks drying in the sudden sun the recovery of stolen overcoats a cloudburst a welter of flame-tipped artifacts marketable information or things about crops and petroleum about wading past the causeway bearing canisters or urns to shower on the coals and if we are bothered by sand fleas and if our intestines are sore where is the thoroughbred inside us or three or four things about runoff about yesterday’s pavement the day before yesterday’s child rolling down a cavity in a play lapped at by feathery birds birds damp with petroleum carved birds with anodyne-tipped crowns 37

birds red from the forge minutes past five or six species of afterglow each in the marketplace each in a matter of parchment we bent in the grain fields weeks ago last week we bent to music this week we sat by the fire eating from a stick.

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3

The Wilds

Child of my hand the field is combed for you in patterns, postage stamps. Yield. I was writing of the sun in that other place and the blaze of it hit me in the runnels, daybook devoted to the swelling laurel tree. I found power’s strap on an old torso at the back of the icebox alongside a fallen item and closed the coverlid the moment the sun stopped. I miss being in its identifying cinch. I gave up my title but reach for it back, pond-dweller spilling flowers on my ruminations.

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i have a little alphabet for you, my near-miss in the disordered port. It keeps track of the aurora speaking of it. Speaking of us on the cedar bench studying the minnow pool on whose utmost layer a stick figure floats its militancy. In the child’s game a child is launched from branch to branch in a toy forest having been targeted for invisibility. I have a little world for you, my sake-of-day, I fashioned it from this world’s seedy thing, dross in which I know you only.

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child does it hurt? The moon is searching you out across the ravine. Day comes and helps you from your blankets. No one needs you to know they are remaining behind where it hurts less, immediately. There is a substance in your hand lifted by your hand from the sill as you went out. It is what, a tissue of fact disintegrating, carrying you to the reputed frozen waters, you leaping across not looking down.

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spring. Absence of wonder. Lay beneath a willow clutching tussocks of whispering grass. Extruded the bloom. Spring. When I consider that I am a half-child, have half a child fading in the glade in disbelief, then I consider that the other child, old and stiff and straying, must stand and wait. Two things, darkness, like two women, one past her best days in the basin, one taken by force. Hurt my hand holding myself in the armed position and the hurt migrated up my arm in sleep past the turnaround point and lodged with me. It was the outcome of a proposition. It was a set of shoe prints in white mud in a given direction.

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we will not stare in that particular pond again. Tell me about the woods again. I was speaking in blocks when I was speaking in sheets. Rain came washing. Nature, its petals, reared up a twig, burnished in my side. We made a truce in our waders in the chill willow stream and rags changed hands, rags in whose illumined threads a future was embedded. Boy slips full grown through the grazing portals into the woods to check his traps.

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you down there, old child, you in your outgrown hobs. I think I’ll remember you spilling your sense where the earthy things play. You, goose-stepping in the poppies, thinking, thinking through a tank. Or on a sea of foam, peeping above your crawlspace, pencil rising and incising. A delight could be had by bearing it, an ornithologist’s delight at the appearance of the curved beak. Vowel pokes from the soil forevermore, I remember. Fastidious rain. Wading pool, stirred by a child’s fingers, in which the dashing watercraft subside. Nail in the socket, memory dividing into grass and brain, I hear music in the stars, dust-obliterating day of welcome. 46

4

Song

Opened the eyelet and was removed from you, my wishful night. It was an amble in the courier’s cart aloft a spray of dressing-up like children. It was a laying-down of pelts it was a funnel at the other’s service. Let me tell you a thing descending on itself, I sang in the field’s footprint. Human colors flourished and made moons an arrow skittered across. We lapped at it and wanted it out and not stopping there peeled the canvas and gutted and stomped the seeds. Was when love swung its branch. Behold the real house rising on its rise its tarred windows cooling us from three-sided day. Was when love hid hard by the whirring grove.

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Belongings

We were there yet sizing up the scenery through the spokes of the one wheel moving this way, the other that. There were four corners of us promenading in the sensation of walking boots. The countryside yielded a desert flower on which a bee reeled in the rain. A mill wheel spun. This was a place we were in it in sensation going there. Did I speak of the shadow the sun made of us on the road at the cattle crossing where the roof of the farmer’s shed was dented by apples and the girl stood between us and her rake? Who was the speaker (hand in a bowl of dates) believing the leaves to be a diagram worn by the land sweeping over his home?

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Which piece of him dug at the orchard with his unshod heel and came upon a desert? a fig tree? frozen pond? stockyard? quarry? hut in the woods? window shuttered against wind? We were people with our belongings. We watched the animal eat its fuel. The leg of the speaker rends its trouser-leg on a thorn of the raspberry bush in which it bends for the hand to steal from nature. The throat of the speaker sings the role of the girl in the wanderer’s song of the farm girl down by an icon in a roiling field. The others on the road (people with their belongings) who heard him knew exactly the girl in the field he meant.

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Early

The ease of crossing on mud-cracked slats of the footbridge amid flickering debris: Good. You’ve brought a thing to eat. The riverbed is inset with fossils. You’re not early. Other better walkers were diverted here and washed their snowy ankles in the briar. Then the storm came back, back then, flooding the lowlands. I’ve seen you in your best suit. It hangs well. It smells of earth. You can lie on your raft in it waiting for the waters to rise to the visible bridge. It suits you. It was built for mourning.

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Poem

Thinking we were grinding down the ramp with our axle to the pool its leafy depths. Thinking we were freed from the moss with three or four clean blows and a sentence, a lyric of wheels and rails. Along the way raiding a tree of its fruit. Wind in the stalks. Two lovers posing on each other against moonlight’s stalkings. Must they disembark, disillusioned? We are after our man he is more than one he is bundled in the earth with spring rain. Known to us if at all by his ring, the one he saved from her finger as she

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dispersed in that language of the dry season. Wind in the statement. Branchings beyond the domed sightline. Two lovers performing as they must against the rim of moonlight charged by daylight.

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Child’s Song

there was an old keeper swam in this song and that broom between her laces offspring in her folds neighbors couched in finery waking in her wood pile came crisped in her garden strung with good trimmings shedding coal dust, bone dust, throat dust cobbler and tinsmith were joined by their tailor in a slinging of implements in an unreflective pool can you follow me down with your hand on a rung to the base of the pit said one to one? in a fleece of warmth can you lead me down

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past the spliced petals to the flowery mews? she wept in her ken tipped in fur she wept on the windowsill rubbing herself for time shedding stone dust, skin dust, speech dust

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Night

Wait it out, daybreak, your accomplice means to show up with his hands groomed just so. Add this to the cart of handmade givens, spool of hissing thread, human bird-wash with its concentric pebbled scrim. You can lie there on your stain on the mat not eating for strength. Where are your throat-calls coming from, lullaby? This time have you gone too far down? Soon there were no brooders to wake in your course of things. They slipped away to camps in the marshy precincts, whirling in windlessness. A cloud sheltered you,

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a finger painting beyond which slumbered a lost figure, a herder, hunter, archer, renderer. Leave your shoes at the cusp in the glowering pile. Leave tomorrow to purity. Scrub matter, that pollen, from your nails, click at a time. Day over, daybreak. We are after you in grief with a skein of knowing.

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Autumn

I neared completion grain spilled from the hopper generator was fed instructions for the nesting of songbirds in weaves of sound Was in repose in the grassy blanket in the five-fingered glove of childhood, bitter flower, horsehair, airman’s shield, memorabilia Flax-bordered meadow and marshy lowlands idea of spirit coming after a buried plate and a plate of freshly gathered stems wandering through the early melt as a form of livelihood

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Refuge Event

was them in motion beside the open cart on steel wheels drawn by a tawny mule in the modern day having bartered for cart and animal in motion beside orchards bordering the receding town receding crows on the roof and a boy watching them above his shovel in his pose animal poked with a stick between lurid exhalations and a finch flicking itself at gnats in the air in motion and the crate or cart mounded with leathers tools from the workshop drill press/lathe/iron forms/dyer’s vat them bartering in syllables anonymously in August in wool coats and hats in the documentary evidence in stiff polished boots laced high and unbroken-in spring rain had rutted the road with a gap in motion in eventual summer axle needed mending 60

bucket needed washing with the wash and the boiling water (good-bye mother with her bag of wash) in a surge of details past slumbering countryside in a past tense wing or cargo hold

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Song

Landed in its nettles, its sunlit trench in which a root was notched by the tool’s dull edge, sorted, corded, tagged, dragged off by an element, a wind, turned to cinder, done this way he will not grow back Landed on the path between former trees traversing the foothills in golden serrations at his side despite ourselves, fingers plying the air with small translucent kites playthings fed to the birds like decoys this way he can proceed without pause

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hedge having been cleared outbuildings pulled apart barrels patched with tar how could he lift himself straight up how will we meet up or join onetime ridge high and lonely pheasant’s nest flecked with eggshell

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Willow

Okay, willow, breathe on me from the sunless opening in you— crescent of gouges and breezes—slope on which beetles stumble and are flushed out— Traffic, human traffic with its rinse of promises and pauses is coming for keeps. And look there goes a swallow transplanting soil. Me (let me think it) I can sit on this bench longer than nature and not know or crave a thing about this bench, bottle cap dented into its plank and initials scratched beside it, beside the point: two raw letters forward to back just as rare as any combination. And now the date, plume of digits, daily statistic. This is behavior, willow, this drone, it accompanied you once in your grove of which you have a memory—a lush one—don’t you? Was there no breath of you there?

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I crossed the arc of your silhouette and lapped your leaves’ signature. Things grew from you beneath you in the patched grass and not far away sat a man on a bench. You take it in or you don’t. You hide the sky or else. Things lived in you. You, stranger.

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