January. The archer aims at himself.
His target is the eye of a fish. River
is frozen. Field rises in mist of lost
desire and steams the sealed sky open.
Fish be ruby-weeping. Fish be nailed
through scale onto door of silver birch.
Over the mountain beaten boy searches
for his teeth inside a clump of brambles.
The sound of thorns through his skin
is mercy. The sound of a beautiful fish
being nailed to a door is mercy, mercy.
Nobody knows the origin of music,
or who wind pitches for between rock
and rock like a bronco heart kicking
in its cage. Breeze seduces bow. Bow
abandons arrow. Boy finds shelter
in thicket and hears music of his breath
through ugly, twisted thistles. Come
home. It’s time to begin again. A boy
is nailed to the door and a fish is aimed
at an archer, mountain is weeping rubies
onto frozen river while wind grinds
two new teeth. Who are you
inside the music of another’s suffering?
When I was a nail I loved only
the hammer. When I was a breeze I died
on a door. When I was a fish
I swam without knowing not yet, or last
breath, or shore.

I thought my life was
my intelligence. But then a dimming overcame
me,
then a wind, and then the whole
sound waveletted, aroused.
I was extremely gradual in my
misgiving, as I looked (for things did not
look) upand there the buffeted
high race of K’s revealed, so that a man could
see it for imself, the fabled column in the clouds
(which heretofore I’d only known
from books): and it had one
long eyehole through it
to a blue too light
to trust. (The lightest blue is heaven’s kind
of founding oxymoron.) It’s not there
for us to understand; it’s there for us
to be looked down on through...
How clumsily I made my way
upstairs from shore to cover
where a forest took my thrashing for me.
Still I’d had my awful
eyeful of the future, in which we
are bearing up for life, while it
bears down, a mind for legalism,
slow. It has the time. (Forget
your airs). It has the grounds.

The lovers say nothing.
Love is the finest of silences,
the one that trembles most and is the hardest
to bear.
The lovers are looking for something.
The lovers are the ones who abandon,
the ones who change, who forget.
Their hearts tell them that they will never find.
They don’t find, they’re looking.
The lovers wander around like crazy
people
because they’re alone, alone,
surrendering, giving themselves to each moment,
crying because they don’t save love.
They worry about love. The lovers
live for the day, it’s the best they can do, it’s all
they know.
They’re going away all the time,
all the time, going somewhere else.
They hope,
not for anything in particular, they just hope.
They know that whatever it is, they will not find it.
Love is the perpetual deferment,
always the next step, the other, the other.
The lovers are the insatiable ones,
the ones who must always, fortunately, be alone.
The lovers are the serpents in the story.
They have snakes instead of arms.
The veins in their necks swell
like snakes too, suffocating them.
The lovers can’t sleep
because if they do the worms eat them.
They open their eyes in the dark
and terror falls into them.
They find scorpions under the sheet
and their beds float as though on a lake.
The lovers are crazy, only crazy
with no God and no devil.
The lovers come out of their caves
trembling, starving,
chasing phantoms.
They laugh at those who know all about it,
who love forever, truly,
at those who believe in love as an
inexhaustible lamp.
The lovers play at picking up water,
tatooing smoke, at staying where they are.
They play the long sad game of love.
None of them will give up.
The lovers are afraid to reach any
agreement.
Empty, but empty from one rib to another,
death ferments them behind the eyes,
and on they go, they weep toward morning
in the trains, and the roosters wake into sorrow.
Sometimes a scent of
newborn earth reaches them,
of women sleeping with a
hand on their sex,
contented,
of gentle streams, and
kitchens.
The lovers start singing
between their lips
a song that is not learned.
And they go on crying, crying
for beautiful life.

What we live
before the light is turned off
is what prevents the light from being
turned off.
In the marrow, in the nerve in
nightgowned exhaustion,
to secure the heart,
hoping my intention whole, I leave
nothing
behind, drag nakedness to the brisker
air of the garden.
What the sweeper has not swept
gathers
to delay all my striving. But here I arrive
with the first stars: the flame in each
hanging like a trophy in the lull just
before
the hours, those antagonists
that haunt and confiscate
what the hardware of slumber draws
below.

Night sky,
all day the light
responding without proof, vigorously
embraced blue,
lavender-sucking bees,
a stone spewing water to golden carp.
Light piled on indisputable light rekindled bits
of garden
until bare-shouldered, coherent, each root,
its stem,
each petal and leaf
regained its original name
just as your door opened and we had to go
through.
Which is to know your returned darkness
was born first
with all its knowledge
routine in the settling down, little thumps
like someone knocking at the temple
arriving
within each soul growing old
begging, impatient
for those nights to end, wanting
never darkness
its murmurous mirror:

its drained tongue
as dead driftwood soaking the vein
as these words float up
out of body
in a joke sharpened in or sharpening
each myopic minute
met
and now dirtied up, or far too beautiful
for this
and now desperate for
the never would or could
or at least had not meant to mean). Pity the stirred.
So stormed out, as in exhausted, my eardrums left
watching.
Each nerve, in the mood exhumed,
hissing, go away,
go away, might sky, did we come this far together?
I am cold. And in this next breath,
the same waking,
the same hauling of debris. I am
here in the skin of...otherwise) shoveling out, dryly