The dark cat crosses

before the white door

of the double garage--

crosses as densely

as collapsed shadow,

yet has the faked lightness

afoot

of the easy target

whose only defense

is a quietly

fracturing heart.

As the gray rain slants

across the lengthening day,

I settle into the deep chair,

into the soft cushion with

hard ridges set to the shape

of The Uncle's broader beam.

I look out the bare window,

through the film of grime

that is the fine debris

of breath and touch.

I take to myself

the yard's dull pantomime

of the greater world's

gradual seep and sink.

I lock into the chair

shaped to my discomfort.

What lies beneath the surface

is the river that the skin conceals.

We know the current by its banks

and mark our organs by our bones.

As by degrees the larvae drift

toward the gaping carp, so, too,

our cells divide like hives and wash

down the narrow culverts of our blood.

(A bee keeps stores of secrets

like a bowel and a river bottom.)

What filters through the river dog

is what leaves the liver blind.

What thrives within the sunken hull

is what escapes the surgeon's eyes.

At what level

or levelling

of loss

does the soul

find

equilibrium?

Perhaps,

when it stands

as hard

and raggedly

narrowed

as a red butte,

as stubborn

as stone

surrounded by air

that is

the arid

residue

of the ancient

river's sorrow.

To lose and then to find

is not, strictly speaking,

to subtract and then to add.

lacks the plain

durability

of the red,

has little

of the persistence

of tar,

is a nuisance

to new shoes

and gardening nuns,

can be fashioned

by a craftsman

into a facsimile

of the pottery

in which Paris

captured and stored

Helen's tears.

A poem should begin

up in a tree--

in a chandlery

of owls--

in a chandelier

of Autumn stars.

A poem should breathe

the dark morn mist--

keen with the grass

of maidenhair.

A poem should lie

like a chin

on a violin--

like the silence

before the final dance

begins.

A poem should be

theophany--

a Luna moth

enlarged

upon the moon.

It is the darkness

shifting among the vague shapes.

It is the soft rain

falling through the darkness

like the residue of starlight.

It is the sound of space

disguising itself as silence.

having stems

or

having the stems

removed--

the single word

serving

diametric states--

what separates

a smooth smoke

and

a hot one--

what defines

the one

by the other--

what designates

both

in the same

breath.

By August, most of the pods

are the size of small lemons.

All are seamed into sections

like peeled tangerines,

but the seams here are ridges

and the green skin has the texture

not of the rind,

but of cotton fabric

sun-dried to a soft crinkle.

Within each swelling pod,

the amniotic air has a sweetness

gone slightly stale.

Within each, the tiny cherries

roll loosely about--

collect where the seams join

at the bottom,

where the pod opens

over the dense ground

with such quiet suddenness

that each bright expenditure

enlarges

the earth's store of rapture.

Some has leaves

as grainy

as old potatoes.

Some has leaves

as hairy and hard

as bricklayers' knuckles.

All has flowers

as green

as cheap gold

on damp skin.

But some is

as small and as round

as baby palms.

And some is

as long and as sharp

as whiskey trickled

down a raw throat.

In the stone garden,

the old monks

reconsider the necessity

of self-immolation.

Meanwhile,

the acolytes

drink jiggers of gasoline

and refine their prayers.

The burial interrupted

by a slow landslide,

sidestep to safer ground.

Middle-age does it.

Makes a man

admit that he admires

the new husband.

Write comical letters

to the dead mothers

of strangers.

Manners--

good for nothing

but making a sneeze

permissible.

Smiles

like dental x-rays.

Genuflections to

the objectification

of sincerity.

Pockets full of

foreign coin,

Belgian cough drops,

a Spanish word

saved in a small square

of aluminum foil,

a key from the curb

below the Eiffel Tower,

lint nostalgic for Geneva.

The lion hiding in the shadow

of the hunter

knows instinctively

that "Nature" is nonsensical--

that the cycle of chase and kill

is but an endless luxury of blood

furious for escape,

and flesh, its torment.

A mosquito,

or rather its frail-winged,

leg-trailing silhouette,

comes out of the cool night air

and flickers through the oblong,

late-hour light of the television.

After a moment it returns

to the wash of dry heat,

hesitates,

then attaches itself at last to images

that, upon the ultraviolet spectrum

of its sight, pulse like a CAT scan

of a place where the blood is pooling,

even as we watch.

Actually, a couple is walking slowly,

their heads lowered to catch the words

that pass between them more quietly

than footsteps on new grass.

They walk toward a white farmhouse

hidden beyond the gradual hill,

beyond the sunlit slope

passing underfoot in New Hampshire.

If a poet's skull

could be opened

like a dripping clam,

would the white halves

hold a perfect pearl

or just a tiny hunk

of gasping gristle?

That is, should a poem

roll over the fingertips

like an entirely

encapsulated word,

or world--one harder than,

if not nails,

then fingernails--

or should it squawk

syllables more oily

than the noises

that fish make

when the shark

explodes upwards

toward the sunlight

and the seal?

Simple tactics.

Sublime results.

Magazine page

left in a telephone booth:

below the avalanche

sits a small house

built by a man who knew

the routes the snow takes.

Old inclinations.

New configurations.

Note in the margin

of a borrowed book:

"Santayana spent his winters

in Rome. . . .

He met with Ezra Pound

but avoided Mussolini."

Symptoms of ignorance.

Longings in silhouette.

Definition delivered

by electronic mail:

"Curvilinear--

Formed, bounded, or

characterized

by curved lines."

Perceptible endings.

Disturbing revelations.

Vignette overheard

while purchasing luggage:

Over dinner, the newspaper

split between them,

she said, "Oh, Brezhnev died."

He answered, "Who's Brezhnev?"

Torturous going along a high crest,

like an amputation in increments.

Then rest in a lee shadow,

like warm sleep in a cold season.

Brief dreams out of the solar wind,

each driven grain

a tiny, perfect bead of glass,

each howl of air

a lost oasis.