A married couple, or, An eventually married couple, who at the present time are playing two unmarried people

I. Over dinner, he tells a story about his younger brother

and one of his younger brother's friends, named Royal:

as stories do about family, this particular story tends

towards a sort of comedy, knee-slapping, as it were,

and head-knocking in reality: but not wishing to spoil

the moment, he focused on a sound like cartoon

coconuts -- TOH -- or that sound's absence,

instead of the pitiable tears of the two little boys,

and on exactly how it is an older brother uses toys

for his amusement (for example, a Big Wheel race

in the basement, and if anyone falls off -- THUMP --

he, always a certain he, becomes a speed bump).

II. When she laughs, it is like something has preceded conscious thinking--

she laughs like a turtle loves its shell.

What he grasps too late, like a man who is sinking

through the ether: he already fell.

III. ... the secret to eggs for dinner is slow cooking,

and, while eating, not overlooking

what waits between books on computer programming

and outdated theories of human evolution

--as if the vagaries of modern flirtation

and workplace ethics have to do with cave-dwelling,

as if we ever lived in caves, or with stalking

wild game (of course there was no 'unwild game'),

over great stretches of savannah, hunters sweating

and hoping for rain, quietly handtalking

about prey in various senses ...

IV. In the video, what the man in the married couple fixes

is scooters, and she is a bookstore clerk.

Over time, although it might not seem to work,

they see, meet, dance, and sing.

(Begun 1 July 2013, perhaps still in progress even more than most poems are. The immediate inspiration was a video of two dear friends pretending to be other people falling in love with each other; bits and pieces are memories, bookshelves, and the odd creeping in of images on their own.)

In a photograph, my father

I. In a photograph, my father:

skin red from the sun,

his sky-blue shirt

hangs open, his eyes

wide open and calm.

He looks at the camera

like he can see who sees him:

on and on his eyes

on an ocean of time,

the sinking and his sunburnt

lines.

II. A group of kids had found him

for their scavenger hunt:

they laughed and took his picture.

I don’t know --

he doesn’t know, either --

what item they thought him.

He looks through the lens,

like all of us, wondering

how did this happen?

And will the end be just

as surprising?

(Begun 8 June 2005 [!], revised 19 April 2006, revised again on Father's Day 2013. This little ekphrasis really is in response to a photograph, and there really was a scavenger hunt. How a scavenger list predicted or accommodated my father is anyone's guess.)

An Iowan brown

Brown like the shadowed undersides of overpasses,

they flicker: a flock of birds against clouds

of glistering, oil-barrel ashes, clouds

of poured concrete, still drying, like drops

of water from rusted metal, a post-

industrial leap of muscle and friable

bones from earth and electrical wires

to the sky.

In a seemly rush they are flying

away from the blue and deepening blush

of rain.

(And on the same stiffening wind,

a drift of distant cows: a waft

as faraway warm and soft as each mildering

roadside farm, each squat and sagging

building rotting like an unpicked fruit:

a red body sickly sinking to the ground,

its skin giving way, in the "smokeless burning

of decay" -- of time -- to a fine, compostible brown.)

(Found and finished 9 June 2013 while following I-80 from Chicago to Omaha, first via a lovely Y-shaped flock of birds flying north across the highway ahead of a tremendous cloudburst, then remembering the astonishment of a friend -- who had recently driven across the Midwest for the first time -- at the industrial remains of the 'Rust Belt'. The quotation is from Frost, "The Wood-Pile".)

Four Midwestern views

I. Every so often, an ivyless tree:
they might seem barest for wanting that scaling,
enameling green,

but the birch is fairest to me: its skin,
like yours, my dearest, a papery white
and black pepper into cream.

Or so I believe, for nights like whispering
ivy, nights like obligatory fig leaves,
kept true colors unseen.


II. A tree, trunk split
like a rod for finding water had been planted in the earth
in the shadow of a crystalline cellular tower --
a rigid and uncompromising metal structure --

its branches like languid rivers bridged
in diamonds of darkened ebony and alabaster:
a tree like the evening before, but already

there comes, obscuring
the sun, the morning after.


III. A cloud foregrounded in passing: a dragon,

its massive jaws open, its right nostril smoking

in anticipation of air turned to flame,

back arching and bearing its squamous way down

on a knight -- like a lightning

strike to a tree --

who is found all shaking, his mail gone to flickering 

scales, in the salivary

rain, of leafy

green.


IV. "What you don't see is her riding the dragon."



(Found and finished 1 June 2013, in pieces on a drive from Rochester, NY, to Chicago, across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The day had a high albedo -- it was bright but clouded -- and so seemed conducive to reflection. The quotation constituting the fourth 'view' is due, with gratitude, to an astute reader of poetry, with a specialty in such metamorphoses as might take place in [stories about] the heavens and the trees.)

I am told that tights aren't pants, but the girl

I am told that tights aren't pants, but the girl

at the next table over looks thoughtful to me

in style. She purses her beautiful lips

like petals: a red just this sweet side

of pink, of the sort one imagines appeals

to bees -- as if, like us, they bother

with the colors of what they drink. And skin

the proverbial cream. She is also wearing

what seems to be a new man's button-down:

a pale, morning-glory blue (or morning-after?),

shades lighter than the darker blue of her eyes

(cornflower); the sleeves, pushed up, slip down

the length of her arms, like water down off-white

stems; and the collar, folded open, shows just

enough throat to signal her defiance of the winter.

(She quickly removed her coat.) Her style

belongs to the spring. I am, meanwhile,

torn between thinking these sorts of things

and noticing that, when she eats, and I 

have seen this, now, many times, she almost

invariably manages to slime in tendrils

of her own hair, not very long -- it is naturally

salsify blonde -- in with bites of sandwich,

and then spends time extracting the hair

with pesto'd fingers and cleaning it of masticated

food and her own saliva; the ends

are now tinted green. I am counting the bites.

This is a good deal less appealing than pants that are tights.

(Composed 12 February 2012, on the first cold day of a winter that has been unusually warm and dry, such that certain things have been unseasonably in bloom.)

Fragments from an unknown epic poem

Presented here are the surviving thirteen fragments from an unknown epic poem in at least six books, plus four fragments of what is for metrical reasons a clearly different text and may be from a commentary that has become confused with the epic in the manuscript tradition. Although the structure and content cannot be known completely, the surviving material suggests that a model was at least the first six books of Virgil's Aeneid (c. 19 BCE). The fragments have been arranged with that model in mind, while their original ordering in the manuscript is indicated via bracketed numbers.

The title and the author of the poem are unknown. Internal references suggest a date in the late 20th- or early-21st-century, although somewhat earlier or later cannot be excluded.

attributable to Book 1 [1]

 … the edge in their quickening smells of native sage and skin

in the dark as it cools, the tap of her second-hand heels like the color

of oiling a hide, of counting down the remaining time,

the straps of her bra showing through like ink in a practiced hand,

the margins ribboning black on the flawless book of her back,

the pages the pale white curves of her shoulders and blades, her eyes

and their almost glower -- he reads -- how they crinkle and narrow with laughter

and mean, she is laughing now …

attributable to Book 2 [3]

 … a night in the long-ago South, this night

in the West, the feeling that a drive will eventually end, and with it

the feeling of her fingers curving over his shoulders from behind, he keeps

both hands on the wheel, his eyes on the rearview mirror, he tries

not to angle it down as he drives. "I think you're cute, professor."

(He is not a professor; it's what she likes to ...

attributable to Book 2 [5]

 … her lover and the man had gone back, her partner,

they had left already then circled around, they had fallen, and the women --

both blonde, they had bonded while lying improbably together on the floor

underneath the dining-room table, shielded from the light and aglow,

both at that moment like honey when the sun is first let into the comb.

Only who is the honey, with its collagen flow, its gloss and gleam

like a moan in the vulpine, cornering glean of the sun? And who

the firm and pliant chambers of the comb? …

attributable to Book 4, of some uncertainty in ordering relative to each other [8]

[8a] He walked her home, after bad but earnest blues music, middle-aged,

and flavorless beer, and even there she had gotten herself

gently stoned. They were perfectly arm in arm, just the right heights,

and to passing cars she called out "Chivalry!" It was the middle of the night.

[8b] Later, while he brushed his teeth in the kitchen, her flaxen hair

in the chrome and silvery dark: she had done it up loosely with long black

pins, and strands curved down to those curving shoulders of hers.

He traced them with his …

[8c] He watches her wash the concert blush from her face and the green,

that cometous green, from under the slate rainshower of her eyes.

attributable to Book 4, but possibly corrupted by marginalia, as the diction does not completely match that of other fragments; it is not certain whether all or part of this passage is direct speech [7]

 … it's bones, eye-sockets, it's the way it would fit,

and the delicate rhythm of ears, their shadows, as hair is brushed back

like a kiss [plucked up by the roots], only once, just once and again,

one's way, it's a loss of one's way to the tick of the clock of her second-hand

heels, those too-swift boots, her strut, he is looking -- he knows

he should not be looking -- at the curve of her <butt> in fashionable black,

he is looking at the round of her <ass>, and now not a [snatch] of any hair

but a kiss, just one, only once, her … dusky like smoke,

 … her skin … powdered

attributable to Book 6 [2]

 … and gesturing now with his hands to show branchings of possible lives --

he is sketching the four dimensions in three -- he is sealing their corner

away from the raucous air quietly; the table in-laid

with jostling tiles and glazed with ice mopped only haphazardly

up from the frozen margarita she spilled, as the one tilts further

away from the other: not the two, they lean closer together like lovers:

two …

attributable to Book 6 [8d: in the manuscript, immediately after [8c], but more likely a reflection in book 6 on an episode not completely narrated in book 4]

" … how short you seemed, next to me, in your white undershirt, your white

unbooted feet. How small. And sudden the thought came to me

that here we could be as if already old: after years had passed

but not taken any four copper coins as their toll; as if we had somehow

managed to hold on to something of a life as it rose like a dream,

rose, as they say, through one or the other of the gates of ivory

and bone, looking up and seeing light. With a groan it breathed itself

away. We had never even kissed. It was as if we had managed to miss

all the usual paltry aggressions and fears, those few minutes only

alone in the noise of a few dingy bars over so many years,

a few minutes only in rented cars and a van, one night, after you had made a point

of singing off-mic, and one morning after that had stretched into early

afternoon, while we shared a catfish lunch (we had both been slightly

drunk and had no taste for … "

attributable to Book 6, evidently near to his final words to her [9]

[9a] "I repeat myself in case -- it is not a hope: in the properly futureless feeling,

a sideways motion like sharing that drink from the faucet after brushing,

when our heads had to turn so far on their sides -- I can see you remembering --

that our glasses fell in, both of us laughing and seeing what could,

had it all only been otherwise, have been such a lovely quiet

and life. You won't face me. But I can see you tracing, in your mind,

the tracks of that ancient flame. I repeat myself from far back,

from far enough back: the right moment, that might … and its backwards

motion and drive, its backwards curve, in my mind I reach back

for your fingers curving over my shoulder from behind. … "

[9b] "At [the time], I kept both hands on the wheel."

[9c] "I offer to carry your bags, I can see … you refuse"

[9d] "In my [dreams] I keep both hands on … "

Commentary [4: the reference to 'this poem' and what seems to be a quotation, albeit from a section lost to us, would seem to make this identification certain]

[4a] … this poem the momentum imparted by life,

this life as it leaves, that drive as it drops

her off at her hotel, that curve -- "No, really:

those curves" -- as it gains in speed as it always …

[4b] … turning so straightly away. Now only

in the mind ...

Commentary? [10: the level diction and clarity of syntax would seem to make this identification rather certain, despite the metaphor]

Whether or not we have had to leave

Creusa behind, we stand to run

aground on Dido's shores and leave

again.

Commentary? [6: whether this is the poet's or the commentator's is impossible to decide, despite the difference in meter; if the poet's, it is possible that this belongs to a different poem, although it develops a related image of a similar theme]

 … and it's not the hair like bales in springtime

sun, it is not so long, this is no

fairy tale, that urges to try

to climb away from an evident life:

like a bowl its sides are thinner than air

and slower-than-lightly curving, light

as the lives we might have lived flash, gloss

in the table, lens flare, and loss of childhood

fables away …

The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves

The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves, the

waves white-capped by the moon. The creak of the

pines, their sway as if in a dream of

limbering up their roots and timbering

ships: as if they dream, to a tree, of

wanting to fall, that clasp of brackish

water about their curving forms, the

viscous slip together of their own sticky

saps with blackening pitch. But the ragged

canyon below is only tricklingly

streamed, and the valley beyond has long since

watched, in the light of countless rising

suns, its steaming waters recede, in-

deed forgotten the march, as if in

search of the suns' last place of sleep, of

staunch and prizing glaciers. The rocks sink

low to the hill and ballast the creaking

trees. The wind drops brown and verdant

needles on mosses of impossibly soft sea-

green, a soft and unmoving sea-foam. These

colors, tonight, like the white just edging the

darkening craters of the moon: this windswept

life like nothing so much as the light on the

airless surface of the moon.

(Begun 18 January 2012, edited 24 January 2012, "in the kind of chill that the working brain / foolishly thinks it can evade by keeping still." I tried to evoke the sort of sense-perceptual experience of a place that, repeated over years, becomes infused with the feeling of time passing: the particular experience of the place seeming to capture both the surprise and the familiarity of 'it all'. With shades, probably, of some of the 20th- and 21st-century British fiction I read over the winter.)

A natural light through the leaves

Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.

Three mountain songs

1. There is empty, where a mountain used to be

and there is only the sound, as up from a well,

of people, a hole in the passive ground,

in the massive earth: a hole in the impassive

earth--they are echoing forth, in the light

like a plastered wall, they are thick like branching

cracks, as a house: it settles over time,

in seasons of chill and slackening heat,

and we their spiraling leaves.

They shake in the light, and we--with a mind

to speak like a child will sparkle its voice

through the vanes of a fan, such an enervating hum,

because he feels that all is not as

it is said to seem to sound, as if

electricity will never give out--

he touched a coin to a socket, and the burn

flat black, a spark and scorched new kitchen

veneer--as if the body will never

give out in the mind, lie down in the light

that is clear and is like no fire.

And there is empty, where people used to be,

and trees that were never blown down or away:

there is only the shadow, and only the things

that shine.

As a mountain must one day go, and in

the hollow, the moss, its ply and drunken

sapling green, its strong and watery being.

All this a memory of seeing.

And the loss, sky-black, below.

2. In the mountains, there you feel free

if your living is elsewhere, but your living is there

and not for so long that the height has flattened out,

but later, for any earlier insight

is a terrible perversion, monstrous, prodigious,

like a stillness resolved--it is the aversion

of the fixated eye, looking at and looking out--

into a choice, and the product of a choice:

a child who is surely alive, although

his heart is stillborn, a rouged and brazen

body box, skin fresh, for the ash made gummy

and molded like modeling putty.

The bodies are plump and soft; his heart

is made to pump blood, and when he breathes,

there is a sound like leaves that, dead, still rattle

over the asphalt like tin.

But in the mountains, you may wish for him to die

and, laying him out for animals, on the moss,

sky-black, to find, you may prefer to say why.

3. Not quite all around the mountain, the road,

and on it leaves, a rattle like tin

that is not elemental but machined of the earth,

filled once with a fluid of vegetables, salted,

machined of the clear-cut mountaintop, ziggurat-

truncated flat, or meat for the man

or woman who is tired all day to reheat--

as well as all night--and eat until 'deeply' and,

however impossibly, 'filled':

The impossibility being that oceanic

feeling when one, whether man or woman,

is the shore and the other--or child--becalmed:

when the land has locked the people under and in.

And something warmed over.

There is empty, where a glacier used to be,

its great indifference to the living--in passing

tones they hiss like steam, their swift

and inaudible being, their groans--and its glide

like window-glass over time to the bottom

of the frame.

How many more hammerings flat or

thin? How many more leaves that sound

like tin, and are heard--so rarely are they gold--

in the stillness that holds, on the surface, between
two sky-black waves of the sea?

(Edited 28 August 2011, begun 18 August 2011. These three together draw for their central image on Wang Wei's "Lu Zhai", a poem that does wonderfully much more than it says, and for their central theme, if there is one, on Plato's suggestion--more haunting when removed from the context of his elaborated metaphysics--that we may remember more than we have experienced. With thanks to students and colleagues in the Language & Thinking program at Bard College.)

A setting of "Getful of apple"

I'm honored to note that "Getful of apple" has recently been set for mixed chorus. A recording of the first live performance may be found here. The composer is Kari Francis, vocal percussionist for Musae, known from such videos as this.

The look that a woman or girl

The look that a woman or girl reserves

for a prettier woman or girl. It is

in part resentful, in part--her darting

eyes--full of pity and need, of a glancing

feeling of sympathy pains at pinched

toes, at arms and shoulders exposed

to the prickling air, of flush at pluck

of hair (her eyebrows and who knows?).

The one--as they say, as she may have been told--

is mousy and must seem dutiful: merely

dressed, not adorned, and dully colored,

she is used to standing out only when not so many

others are around. The other is strawberry

blonde and hungrily thin; she is clothed

much closer in, and shows much more

of her pale and prickling skin. She does not

wobble on her heels, however improbably

high. But she is not less dutiful.

The one is looking; the other is listening

in, to the thinned and darkened voice

of an older woman nearby: she used

to smoke, and still she wishes to smolder,

with makeup stark and clear. But it is

not bright: like her eyes--well past resentful--

and the heatworn russet of her hair, the color

of heatwoven corn. (And if you husked:

the stretched and restitched skin that barely

covers the skull, the cottony tufts

of the will, desire worn thin, rewashed,

and worn again.) The look that a woman

or girl reserves at what she feels is the end.

(Begun 28 April 2011, edited 2 May 2011. From life or what has been made, not asked, to pass for it.)

These period pieces

Because of formatting, this poem is available as a two-page .pdf dowloadable here.

His eyes are amber and slate

At the next table over, a man. He is small

of jaw; some might go further--I think

too far--and say "like a rat or a mouse."

But no. He is too lean and upright

and, in his delicately quarried eyes,

too deliberate and attentive: he is too bright.

It is true that, when he smiles--as often--

or laughs, although little sound comes out,

he shows a great many yellowed teeth. But we

should see how rarely he blinks, and each time

dares to think how bright and upright

is the woman across the table, his daughter: 

he couldn't be prouder or--what amounts

to the same--more relieved. The feeling is plain

in the granite-in-rainfallen grey of his eyes.

He is clearly surprised at having raised her.

He blinks and, thinking back, he wonders

what it would have been to have been raised

by a woman who … --he blinks-- or had

the strength --and thinks, despite that radiant

glow, of a woman bent over below

fluorescent lights, a linoleum kitchen

in colorless white and green, a white

that can never come clean, be it scoured, the bruised

and reddening silence--no sound is allowed

to come out--the desperate acceptance and over-

exposure to slams of cupboards and drawers

--he blinks-- the flatware rattled, the occasional

shattering glass --he thinks-- of feverish

polish and impossibility of shine.

His eyes are amber and slate --he thinks,

somehow it is not too late-- and the sun

through passing clouds --he has saved, if not

his mother, then another young woman after all this time.

(Edited and begun 10 April 2011; directly inspired by a vision, 9 April, of a patron at the local coffee shop; indirectly inspired--already envisioned--by the bright but clouded natural light, and its effects on the skin of tablemates, at meal 3 April. Many thanks to the visible and otherwise perceptible beauty, so deeply lived-in, of all involved.)

The musical rain; or, Four ways of looking at a lack of heard

I. The brightest thing there could be

 ... these may mean the

same thing, the poem whose appearance is re-

fracted by language and textual tradition (that

is to say, by human concreti-

zations of abstract time), much like the ex-

perience of working in a room with artificial

light: a thoughtless buzzing overhead and

blocking any vision--no matter how late one

works into the night or tarries (now, think of wicks

smoldering down, their slow unsmokeless

burning of the passing day)--of the light of those

formerly studied stars, such that one

hasn't learned to speak their language, but

mostly to know that a language was, long ago

spoken: and, now that the lines of communi-

cation have been broken (having always already been

bent by gravity, slowed in its slowing

wells, its curved and carvèd pits of

stick and commemoration, its granite

walls of implacable devotion to deepest

reds), to curse (for this is the light's profit

on't, taught not how to speak but to be

spoken: not the use of language but the

use by it). A man with a magic

book and a man who, earlier than you, was

able to look at the sky at night as a

being far and away, close to some

homely metaphor, of a distance never to be

conquered, for sure, but far and away the

brightest thing there could be at night: those

chaste stars, those chasèd stars, the

air's unbreathable purity and those

stars' excelling pursuit. Such a man, his

eyesight fading, would seek to transmit and,

so, transform their clarity of vision. (Like the

pilgrim on his way, the poet having once been a

pilgrim, any vision of the stars, any would-be re-

vision of a poem blacks out and backs out of trans-

lation at the cost of lost rhythms and times, the a-

scent much harder, against gravity and

out of its well, outwards and as it were

sootily out of the condensation and

frost-bitten meanings of hell ...

II. But the rest is not music

 ... likewise,

"the youth lies awake in his cedar'd garret and

harks to the musical rain": the covering

roof keeping him out of that rain and,

so, out of the rain, which may become

music at a deepening distance alone (that

is to say, at delay and--absent a

bed of mussed and drily muffling

hay--in a disembodying echo and decay).

He harks not to the 'the music of the rain' but to "the

musical rain", its incidental remaking (and

this is the problem of a poem as a poem, of

any top-heavy cybernetic relation): now

lost is the rain as naked and dripping,

lost is meaning in a youth's contrastively

feverish brain. Instead, there is a strained

tapping and slide, the sound of the rain as it

flickers and slicks the jointed cedar and

drips and naturally slips and anoints

what clasps itself, what tarries, to the migrant

spaces between. (These cannot be starred,

their darkness one of old dinosaurs' bones, in

which a red-shifted and reptile track of the

skies has sunk, having too deeply drunk of

blackest tar, into the deepest-

slumbering pit: as the youth pictures it, having

listened to Darwin, dreaming pre-Cambrian

minds, a matter of memory given over to a

claw-footed lumber, now hard like a daydreamed

fruit in matter of fact unripened, the

tap of leanest finger to greenest

rind). There is not only the audient

youth but, making his situation all the more

lonely (he is not pelted by rain but

sheltered and, having but feeling no pain, he can

be no song to himself: no recording of

sounds, only a distorting of sounds), that

haughty, insentient roof. He must have

a mind of rainwater to regard what ought to have

been his own mass of rain-matted hair, his own

rain-kissed skin and all the other wetted not with-

outs but rain-tossed withins, and not to hear

any misery in the sound of what

cannot, any longer, come in, what his over-

hanging roof--overmindful of body, un-

mindful of mind, the roof as permanent

keeper of wholly impermeant time--but the

rest is not music--just won't allow inside.

III. Still, the sounds drift in

 ... and, still, "the sounds drift in. The buildings are re-

membered" by the echoes of rain, its swift and in-

different pointillism: their pieces in uncertain

unions, only honoring the fact of their flat and

hollowing stops of the drops to fall, then to

catch at the breaks and streak where the nails went

slightly imperfectly in--their grey and

greening bronze and blooming rust, their

rustic thin and ten-penny overtones--where the

joints have grown more cottony still to any

feeling over years for the inclement weather, arth-

ritic and exquisitely sensitive to touch, to the

sapping cold and warming, to the the cycle of a

too-much-with-us and sublimely impossibly

far-and-away frequency of attention. The

sounds drift in, meaning that within is now

not without, no longer: the roof a trans-

lucence to sound, a sparkling skin, and a-

gain the angled room: a darkly

resonant space. The bright sunbrown of the

angled youth: he lies awake: he be-

lieves, he lies like a leaf of grass caused to

quiver and hum, held sheltered by fingers and

over which runs the harmonical breath of the

missing musician, what Whitman, recent to tele-

pathic dreams, would in his better lights look

past (that smoky with meats sweated and

dried, a long practice with poultice, with the a-

spirant departure of water from clothes, he

knows their sputtering sizzle, just as much a trans-

mitter as the spattering roof); like the shore to

which these breakered, these housebroken waves of

sound must drift! Could only they hit and

find their fit of skinny rivulet down

skin, as it cools from the day's worth of work, blue-

shifting, and warming to the sheltered pleasure of the

dark, of the cedar'd garret, of the poem that

he must find himself in. (There's a woman who

knows that it's bathers' bodies are better instru-

mental than the cedar of which more ancient or

plaited, upstanding hair might oily re-

dole.) Such a musical sound is a miracle of

loss, the sound of the rain interfered by the

mindless boards: a sound at the cost of

weltering what otherwise could be signal (only

try, only strain to hear those streamers of

water long down and around those bathing

boys!) but, thanks to the cedar, is not any

longer let in to the skin: is sound for

sure, but only in place--for it is special

pleading for ones, like nuns, to fret not at

narrow rooms--of a youth's special feeling for noise.

IV. Finally, about the voice

Is this roof's cedar that in whose limbs, un-

clothed, the blackbird alit? And if he

did, if so, did he know--even as it was

snowing and going to snow, and although it

wasn't yet night (and so no need for

any artificial or cultural light) but

had for so long of the day been evening--that his

perch would make this music of the rain for a

listener, who listens not in the rain (which,

frozen in the mind, is turned to snow of a

technically memorable kind) but within? Is

this why the blackbird is made not to sing, but--as

if the whole poem--"is involved in what I

know", that knowledge being, finally, about the

voice, its "accents and lucid, inescapable rhythm"?

(Edited 8 March 2011, begun 3 March 2011. After nearly a year, over which I wrote mostly academic prose, this sequence marks a return to writing poetry deliberately. To readers of modern poetry, references to Whitman and, especially, Stevens (no (consanguineous) relation) will be clear; in some phrases and images there are also Wordsworth, Milton, and Shakespeare. More ancient authors must probably be thought to appear here and there, but don't knock yourself out.)