Christine Falls on the Road to Paradise Remember how sunlight drills its own road through a cloud? So that through the sky there is a tunnel of sky. Water falls from the sun-struck edge of the glacier. It has no bones, it has no intentions. The sheer air cannot divert it. The masses of granite and greenstone cannot reach it. Only the simple force on the supple body of water moves it down to the flower fields of Paradise: farewell-to- spring, larkspur, shooting star, on the summer slopes, stonecrop, higher and pale, mountain misery, whose five white petals splay in a wheel like Da Vinci's man. Is he rolling somewhere, dizzy but perfected-- into the fireweed, into the monkey-flowers? Or to Christine, who died here or was born, or only remembered by someone making a map. She has left her name to a pillar of water, her monument stubbornly forgetful. Astral Projection I. Each night my body leaves me, walks to the brink of a city she imagines is yours, though I tell her it's my place to wander, hers to sink like an anchor through sleep. I find her counting the lights that swim below her, in the valley, where thousands flip switches, stroke gray cats. I cannot call her back. And when she returns in the morning, stretches out of her wake, I sense again she has not found you. It is not the old law of exile--just the city rebuilding its walls, this time to exclude her. II. To overlook the city at night is to look at the sky: at points of light: to look with the same fear of falling. And each constellation a theory: connect the dots. Out of this problem a building arises, its random lights floating in the harbor, its tenants peering into the world like the drowned at a porthole, their long hair streaming. In the city the sky rolls in and out like a tide, on some nights remembered as it drains away, on others brimming among the rooftops as if they were piers. III. Only then do we know we've forgotten--mistaken the electric lights in the park, each a sufficient moon in its firmament of leaves. The trees glow as only the sky holding the moon once glowed, their lives uncovered like the heads of mourners. But that is how grief in the city burns, in commons where fear of the woods is gone, where only the people harbor death in the sheltered forest; where we are the ocean, the ground, the sky and all our weather: why we gathered here, and why we stay. Billy Goat and the Tree of Life _after a statue found at Ur_ What the Chaldeans saw that set their hammers against the original gold is behind us. A goat we assume is a god, because he stands on two legs, as we do, towers like a tree against a tree. His forked trunk grows, as we do, out of two roots. But the tree rises as only itself from the ground. And so we have composition, the tripod on which a lens can be mounted to stabilize vision. God the goat raises his hooves in the branches. The tree branches, branches as far as the valence of metal allows. They saw this perhaps watching the goats that went among them on four legs, even in the city-- the city, their latest idea, like an upstanding goat, that stumbled forward on language and barter, always out of step. The weight passed from my hand to yours might have been a word that you'd carry the length of the clay-banked channels we would call streets, while the goats wandered everywhere feeding on everything, asking what nothing was worth. Cape Cod On the dunes, on Truro's backside, the clouds open and close like gauze curtains (the yellowed drapes that follow a woman from room to room and keep her last colors from fading) lighting and shading improbable contours.. The dunes mutter with gravity, against gravity, tilting up oddly like concave lenses, and would be glazed into lenses in fact if the heat were greater. Plovers, rain-spotted birds, have congregated in the hollow. They are posing as rocks, the remains of a meteor shower. To the east the Atlantic speaks more clearly. Scrub oak, and clumps of marram grass sharing a single root, like a life-line, explain whatever coherence makes land into landscape: a bargain, constantly haggled, between provisional hills and green bullheadedness. But here, half a mile inland, the weeds have not held on; the ocean's voice is confused by the wind in the random chambers the dunes leave. A woman walking here draws a curtain of sand behind her. The crests of the hill-waves, so sharp when the sun glanced off them, are raining a fine rain of sand. When the woman passes, the birds disclose their wings. They scatter, piping into the air like tongues from the Tower of Babel, out over the dunes. The Lives We Invite to Flower Among Us Flower Beyond Us _For just as that wild animal, if it shall have escaped and thus recovered its natural liberty, is no longer the property of its captor, so also the sea may recover possession of the shore._ --Hugo Grotius Just as that wild animal, the sea, is never in our midst, is constantly our border, so also a leopard, even in a zoo, escapes us. He prowls all our city's avenues, pacing cage corner to corner, even when we are most vigilant. Set him free on a beach. A body in a halo of senses, he moves on the sand like water. The highest wave casts down the shore like a spotted cat. Nothing, our oldest lesson save one, nothing is harder than water. The cat on flat beach, the cat with no tree, no ledge, as if caged, cannot contain himself. So also the thought containing the cat, set in motion in a woman's mind, a word in a halo of sense. She makes the leopard dark avenues into the city of men, and then she makes the seventh wave, ending in foam just short of the body poured out on the sand. But even when she is most circumspect, her mind cannot contain itself, as a vase may hold a flower but may not hold itself. She loses the word that stokes her into sense, that moving cage and comfort. The cat escapes into the oldest lesson: no thing is more yielding than water. The woman rests her mind in her body in a halo of sense, as if she were the sea, and continent. Saints Hover in the Windows They have been shattered and stitched with metal. Green branch, gray colonnade-- their landscape resolves, as if the world's kaleidoscope had finally come to rest. How they, in the morning, take the world and pass it in: azure pools on the floor, on the blond pews. They are curious, spread with their open palms through the leaded glass. How they gave back to the city at night, fly like kites in their stone sky and fall opaque while the faithful are sleeping. Who can name them? Their faces are windows. Their lives burn away as the light passes through them. Letters from Three Women We are moving from state to state, as they say of excited electrons, or of water when it freezes and sublimes, or the mind when it enters a drug like an airplane. When the letters bloom out of their envelopes I think it must be spring, remembering winter and the mailbox empty. The pages collect on my desk, interleaved like hands in a public oath. What are we swearing to? One has married her solitude, wants a divorce. One imagines that she has not been understood. One imagines she has. The snapshot taken through a finger-printed lens records identity and place: the smudge floats in the doorway, a halo whose saint has walked out. One morning I watched from that beach while a house rounded Long Point into the harbor. Pennants, strung from the cupola down to the barge, snaked in the wind and shot the gulls through with panic. The windows and doors had been boarded shut, as if the house would founder if it woke. You know me. I thought, _This is history: a house drifting sullenly over the ocean._ Just look at the baggage we carry. It docked at Macara's wharf for months, waiting for cranes from New Bedford to lift it bodily, as we all wait in our rented rooms, or when there's money, in apartments. Today I receive you all in my room, which dangles over traffic. The last one huddled on a different city's ground, under the weight of those families I heard in the night, like Hansel in the oven, listening. I hear, for example, that lessons learned drunk are best remembered drunk, that the mind knows this on the ocean and something else at the kitchen table over coffee; and think especially of the humpbacks, who pass their songs from ocean to ocean in intricate barter. Some days I read you between the mailbox and my door, the way we've eaten whole meals cooking them. Is the ocean just a mind with a tune running through it? The sun here travels into an ocean so monstrous we call it peaceful, adrift on the land. Ghazal The wall erased, its graffiti hang in the air: We are open all night, like old men's windows. The trees creak in the cold wind: doors that rarely open, opening. A man's borders include the ax he swings, the branch it splits. The cold peal traveling elsewhere. And who opens like a door cannot say who might enter, or question the gifts we make to morning, boosting the last of our loves over the wall. The Apple is a Rose: October Fair Apples litter the ground. The world accumulates. I am hungry, and in the tent of apples there is no air to breathe but the breath of apples. I have no money among the baskets of Winesaps, Delicious, Golden Mongol and hybrid experimental apples. This hunger must not be confounded with the fingers that trace the apple's skin or with the delirium of scent. The skin of an apple is a meal made only of exclusions. Lost in a cloud of apples, gathered into the rose I invent a mathematics for what I cannot reach: picture the lines of perspective, receding like wires on which are strung red beads. Inside the rose, this is the portrait of distance. Picture the carnival tent, that blowzy canvas rose that holds the scent of bushels of every apple of our knowledge. Picture the theoretical ant, his incessant exploration. There is no one to tell him to stop. This is the time that hunger's clocks keep in the heart of the rose, in hunger. Cassandra To speak at all I must pose on the highest step, and squander a week's ration of breath. Bird squawk. Wind wash. You hear what I say is abundantly air, more rare in space than the matter with us, and the state. The city rolls over the earth like fog, without landing like fog in beads on the grass first morning. We tried mourning our own passage into still life because we had learned the word: _to mourn_: the warm pressing together of lips at its beginning, and the tolling of _our_ in our throats on its way to denial, _N_. Who imagined the truth was separate from its unfolding? I've seen a ring around the moon, as perfect as Euclid and just that empty. It held a huge dead world, cold light-- and the god who wanted my body has taken my tongue. The ring. The moon nested there threatens to hatch. Lullaby The woman in the next apartment trailed home with a lover last night: soundtrack of keys and voices in the hall, and through the wall later the universal male moan, swinging open the gate in the throat. What goes unheard is seduction, and I thought of you again, your body rangy among the voltmeters and consoles. How accurate our backs are, turned, triangulating the distance between those most foreign objects, each other. This is a state the priests called _immanence_, more blessed in the Godhead's privacy than here, in this room of manifest tables. And this is in praise of simple lust: the bodies pray themselves into encompassing light. The brain thinks _not now, not then_, but the bodies think as computers think, when the current runs through them. Ceremony Three stragglers, Canada geese headed north interlace their lines of flight as if to braid their intentions together. Three? Your leisure, mine, and another. We talk over wine as if we kept no secrets. The geese locate their north, fly out of their knot. The inlet now reflects a world quieter in its spectrum: oaks, sky, the high cirrus washed with a mute green: as it should be, the water that marries them visible. Insomnia in Tucson The moon glares down and the desert glowers back, reflecting on its future. Foothills rise into mountains, mountains rising toward the moon, worn down with waiting. When I woke from my dream of water this is what I saw: the green veil parting, the fabric of coat and the fabric of flesh torn, the body dressed for patience in its durable bones. Even the light is weary, from the sun to the moon, to the earth, now lifting weakly from a white shoulder. Such a long sleep to be broken before sunrise, no sound but a remnant of waves, not here, not here, like all that I've carried, carried too far. Persephone Returns to Hades This is no forced retirement; my job carries me all summer to the adits of abandoned mines. You ask me how many ways there are of slipping into the earth. There's always a new route. Like this: I wade into the rain. Like this: I take the subway. I call it a career, as one careers down a slope on skis. Forgive me. These meetings are awkward as courtship. The truth: I've come through my mirror, as always. I turned and saw everything reversed, the leaves on the brown trees growing greener through the window. I peered in and thought, _This is a room I remember being a woman in._ _This is the way I held my head._ And so I spend my winter here, in your arms, watching for skylights, chimneys, the way out. The Lighthouse Has No Keeper I thought, tonight off Land's End nothing clicks. The Bay is the same old kettle of fish, geologically speaking. A buoy rocks under a cormorant, ringing position. The black fish-eater hangs its ragged wings to dry, _spread-eagle_ though an eagle's wings spread out like entire kites, unlike the kites on broken frames the voracious ancient cormorant angles out. The snake-necked black bird in the dark appears only one second out of every thirty, when the lighthouse sweeps it. Its shape splays like the fossil half-bird, Archaeopteryx pressed in rock, a feathered lizard with a toothy grin. The lighthouse has no keeper, has a clock of gears the mechanic visits monthly. And in fact the lighthouse clicks, somewhere in its shell, behind its diamond eye. I am mistaken. Somewhere in the Bay a dolphin clicks. Its word in the water is 31 meters long, a long word uttered quickly. I think the lighthouse has no keeper. The keeper ticks in its sleep and pulls the light in a broad, sensible circle all night long. Thought, thought is hard as a diamond egg to hatch from. The cormorant's an old bird: pressed through rock it comes out the other side, goes fishing, hangs its wings to dry in the lamplight. Everything clicks. Waking A slow sine wave into day, surfacing from the aquarium. The path your eye insists on, vertical to a hushed sweep, gathering the room into a known geometry. The Seasons Have Unwound and will not circle back again. You pad like a cat through the changing woods, trying to save what's left before winter swallows the red leaf, the yellow, the last finger of the creek that passed through August. It's the question you've answered and never answered: What would you save from a burning house? You clutched at _my daughter, and the key to the safety deposit, where the will is._ Or you guessed an armload of books, your grandmother's dulcimer. The first time the question hypnotized you, suddenly wealthy. _Once I hoped I'd save only myself, naked and untraceable. I wanted to stand in the mob of the curious gathered at the curb and watch the uniforms of recognition kindle and smoke,_ _to be absolved of owning. The present is burning. I know myself only by what I've discarded, a vagrant's inventory of ashes._ The trail is wild with an old palette; you kick away horse chestnuts, little hibernacles. And at a rail fence labeled ^_Private Property, you stop, smoke, ponder the bread you are going home to bake, so happy to be turned back that your muscles hum with you through the dead woods. Maya at Equinox Delicate balances have their points of oscillation composed of a steel knife edge working on agate planes. --_Orr's Circle of the Sciences_ If this were the old days she'd be spinning wool: the last day of summer, the first of something she won't name quite yet, though the sumacs know, the chicory poised in their final reticence know, and name it to themselves while the sunlight draws its blade across them. Today the wool wouldn't stick to her fingers, tacky with sweat. Nothing new has sounded, but something old is quiet, suddenly; she opens her closet, full of woolen coats from sheep a hemisphere away. * The book she takes from the shelf reads hiber- nation, Hibernian, _hiver_. The air still Septemberish: whether to carry a sweater plagues her for once more than the planet, that spins for once not cockeyed. On the street she repeats the word _equinox_. Through the door of the word, a hallway. At the end of the hall, a blue stone. She's on her way to meet a man who isn't her lover: her husband. She spins a curtain of heavy wool. * A woman hangs a blue wool curtain before a stone. Nothing new has sounded, but something old begins to speak, talking her down the sidewalk as if she might only fly by instruments through the clear air. This is the day the year rocks in its balance, _the equal night_. She spins as the planet spins her. The edge between day and night, never so honed: split by the blade she walks both roads, down the street, down the hallway, toward winter. Letter to an Actor Dear D_____, You ask me, _what news?_ I can tell you my days are ground so fine that they build up like dunes, then shudder gradually into the craters under the wind. And the light in this room could be ocean light: blue, its shadows accidental. But this is a city washing around me. The punctual tides are buses bawling through rain. How can I read this summary of roles you have taken and tell you I have none, not even myself? A friend walks in with his day's grief and first I feel how soft his jacket has become with such long wearing. Only later, how warm the body, old spendthrift, throwing off heat. Things that have been cut loose collect in this quiet: the man rapt on the sidewalk who tells me the stars are regrouping, and at the bus stop, the woman. She has carried her story along this route for years. She has waited so long to speak that the words come out yellow and brittle, in danger in the acid air. She says that they're coming to take her away, but she is not there. Henry, Maria, the doctors are not doctors, neither are the children children. She cannot guess I do not know them, her world is so naked and the bus is so late. I am not lonely. This could be after all a morning you would recognize, off-season, if you lie in bed in a white room, your last speech forgotten, the next script shut on your dresser. Keeping House Domestic, as the young cat puzzles out the windowpane: somehow the trees, the diving birds, are cold and flat to touch. The sill is a ledge in the cliff face where the cat suns and grooms her hunger, and murmurs at a bird, as if she is so in love that her voice grows small when she speaks of it. Her body gathers like a thunderhead. Her shadow travels over the glass and again she remembers the riddle and forgets. Behind her, I'm keeping house, with the same concentration: sometimes I hold it, sometimes I let it go, while the walls play their own quantum odds, and keep out the cold. Walking the Borders _for R. L._ 1. The Falls We are washed in sound, hollow as flutes. We are flying, our shadows are flying to Tucson in an old man's camera, even now; set here at the falls' throat to give scale to the natural staircase. He will say, _Those shapes are two women, climbing._ He said, _Don't move. Don't turn around._ Late dawn: it comes almost at noon in the land's deep pockets. A shadow splits my face so cleanly one eye is scalded, the other dark. The water is a ribbon, anchored below and above. And the mist: This is chop-vision, dismembered light, rising from impact. You stroke the veined rock like a man's back. We did not come to be photographed. 2. The Cliffs I want to leave my shadow among these rocks, like a statue, as I have left you silent by the streambed. By now she has entered the earth, your mother, as she tried to before: she jumped and found it closed against her, but now it is open. And you have come into the earth, not to talk, not to touch, not to answer the letters or breathe in the flowers. I've come not to think of you here. Hear: I recite: _my shadow's a hole in the light, the disciple the sun skips over in its laying on of hands._ In the desert it would be priceless, costing me everything. In this canyon the shadows are stone. Here: the mime gathers eggs from a neighbor's coop. _For you,_ I grin. Hold them up to the sun and they disappear. 3. Phlogiston Of the campfire we think: oxygen marries dry juniper, violently, atom by atom. What is gained by this bright union, ash, smoke, our dinner of fried trout. The alchemist thought of fire: _something is lost._ Phlogiston. The igneous humor, the wood's escaping soul. As the soul is lost, in a bad bargain. As the soul is stolen, by a camera, by the naming of a private name. As the soul is thrown from a high window. It rises from impact. You stir the fire. We breathe juniper smoke, oxygen, adding the gases to our blood. 4. The Gallery The moon is collapsing, phase by phase. Its light populates the cliffs with statues, still and gesturing. Your face, my hands, are chalk, are plaster. Your dream: you turned the last of a thousand pages of a book set down in your own round hand, and read _there is nowhere left to wake to._ I claim that we haven't slept. I claim that the statues in the cliffs collapse with the light, phase by phase: _in their decay they beckon, turn their sculpted backs, revolve._ We haven't slept. We have no need to wake. Coffee Over coffee I think of him. He has overheard this rain, or he rains himself out of sleep, not knowing what wakes him. He sways in the kitchen and blinks, one match flaming past his fingers. The water in its black kettle a bird in its covered cage-- a blind where agitation can dissemble calmly. And the earth-black powder just ground. A cup of mud, he calls it. He is careless with his naming and does not know, even after coffee, when he tells some truth and when he lies. Does he switch on the radio? Does he turn off the news and listen instead to the plumbing's bad digestion? Today I am not in that room, and cannot say. Coffee, black coffee. How are my nerves? The first cup is steady, the second still as a pond in a cave. The third begins to stir in my hand, small mammal at the end of hibernation. This is a morning like any other, and here is a way of waking forewarned into its bitter warmth. Maya in Winter 1. For magic, four tools: the wand, the sword, the pentacle, the cup. She must learn their elements one by one, be the patient woman who turns to earth, the screaming woman who drowns in air. And in fire--in fire-- she starts off with water, thinking how gently the riddles will ride in solution. 2. His camera, her beach. After the flashbulb the eye remembers: a blue ring blind at the center. Or is it the sun at noon, low on the water this far north in winter? She imagines for once she's been caught with her eyes open, but what did she see? Everything that floats: scallop boats, gulls folded on the water or unfolding; their cries delay in the air, the ear, after the birds wheel on. She tries to hold her eyes to the white line where the sky and the harbor meet, where the blind circle settles. She turns her head and it disappears; it is the sun. 3. As if her days were programme music, as if her instrument could be tuned by the large hands that float over her in sleep, lighting like water, she watches, erases, raises her cup. She could open this film to the light, and the darkness it remembers as form and the passage of her body would dissolve, so, into what she sees here: the flat sheen of water, light watered and thin. She might begin again, as this bay in December, unwitnessed. Everything that floats is an apparition. She sees much, holds nothing, and soon the fleet will sail through her, trading in fire, in earth, in air. Contra Dance 1. I have worded my days like a careful resignation, and you are accepting, accepting. Your face is clear as good whiskey, telling me lies; what I hear spins my nerves to a web of sleep, where we lie almost gracefully. 2. Tonight we are rich. Our steps nailed the city streets together, corner by corner. We can consult this map forever, snaked between cars and starred with restaurants. We had more pockets than hands, and chose them well for every pose and swagger, like dinner forks at a formal table. We had more words than tongues, and sent them off humming the right tunes. We lie 3. almost gracefully the theater lobby the sheathed women the linear men like a contra dance like pinwheels only children dodging among us like sheepdogs. And if at home I bristled like an electric cat? And if the twice-worn necklace snapped and if your face flew past mine in the mirror like a foreign flag? We have our cash in the bank, and in our cheeks our careful, diplomatic tongues. It Snows Out of a Clear Sky _for C.E.C._ Like the chemist's beaker of tricks, the air: there is nothing there, and then the spontaneous white generation of winter in Tucson. It fills the dry arroyos, caps the hydra cactus, gathers in blades on the alien palms of this desert. What is the _it_ that snows, hiding in the wings of language? The snow that can be named is not the snow touching the saguaro lightly along its spines, jamming the eight-track brains of the highway tarantulas. The woman from Los Angeles whispers, _so that's what it looks like,_ as what she's learned to recognize in books as death or the spiral into silence falls piecemeal before her. It snows, as if someone had nudged it and said, _Talk, or the will not listen._ Invention of the Phoenix Now for once it is the real bird annulled in flames; the one we have built goes on breeding. The phoenix is false, as a word or a friend is false. Remember, we made it from pieces of bird and the idea of fire, from a bird and our confusion: that what is warm can burn. That there is an exchange in which this is the currency. And our confusion about the bird behind its wall of flight: that we are sundered by the third dimension; that we climb only the ladders we see; the bird climbs in transparency. And with the fire: that it comes from the other side of the wall of matter. It appears to all the senses. We have asked it to live among us with the dog, the ox, and it has refused us. It is only that we are confused. We make firebirds, angels, and a bird with a life span the length of memory, which burns, and burns again. They gave me a bell in place of a husband. He tells me one word. All morning while everyone ambles the street (they circle me as if I were a fine lady in a wide skirt) he tells me, _sweet._ My mother told me, "Your skin is like milk. You will marry." She is gone. I have grown so white I can answer the moon. When we're alone my bell whispers. When someone comes near me, he shrieks. Oh, he is jealous. The Dogs are pacing our yards like sentries. The yelp clear across night to each other, planning. They shiver. The virus in each of their glinting minds connects them. The dogs wheel through the park. Already the lawn has grown a tongue inside their rim of teeth. It pleads in a green language: Close your mouths while you chew! Cover your bare grins with your paws, be civil, be mild, be mild. The dogs hurl forward, intent on their leader's tail, invoking the moon, their chalk Madonna. They are calling down snow in the desert, earthquakes, raking up fields of tempting bones. The dogs all dream like early Christians; their teeth prepare for the last day. And what if I dream every night that my flag is a tail, angry and useful? The dream connects. The stiff hairs exclaim. For Jean Valentine _MacDowell Colony 1983_ Only strike the log and the fire explodes in it: beneath it the coals repeat the catalog of forms the planet sleeps through: red mesas, black doorways into the glowing city, bright masks rehearsing the possible, the remembered: this fire eating wood is the earth's long dream of itself in a small brick cave, in this cabin framed by January birches: the living drink light and the dead give it back as flame; this book you've left here, inscribed _with thanks as always_ for the world's unaccountable shelter, and your messengers inside it, calling the sleeper awake. This World Begins on a Wharf shy of midnight. Under a moon that is almost full. Yes, shy. Its light skims a shiver over the bay, the light chill of cold hands. >From here the world purls off in all directions: up, into stars, Orion as always sharp in the chaos of sparks; forward, into the bay, where the sound water beats out of its body rushes in, where a still thick shadow is nothing, or is the breakwater; and down, the world stilted on pilings, over pale sand, now covered by some afterthought of the bay, now revealed, a screen where the moon throws timbers, doctored blueprints, manic carpentry. There are other bearings, poor compass. Their names dissolve into number, the numbers divide like cells. This world has just begun and it fills them all: breakers, dark storefronts, panes of glass pooling the light the length of a narrow street, what the woman on the wharf sees abruptly. Her short hair caught in a gray scarf, her hands clumsy in gloves. She sees so quickly, hears so much with her skin, her blood, that all this time her mind is full of the last world, the one she left when she stepped absently up to the wharf and found herself here. In the Solar Wind There is a sleep that tells every dream as a nightmare: the figures rise up in a locked room, and it is the world. And there is a sleep of open windows, where all dreams unwind in golden light: clear tea with the scent of almonds. If there is something to look on that does not waver like mountains in the mirror of a still lake, like the outline of trees in a light wind, I have not seen it. If there is waking. Here in the thick afternoon, I do not remember. * Love, here is golden tea in a glass cup. It is hot, a flashing cylinder. Hold the cup still and look in: the future is there, but not in a Rorschach of leaves. Steam rises from the tea, and what begins in this room continues. To the molecules every wall is a window. * The table he sets the cup on becomes a story about a table: It has four legs. And another: She rested her head on the table. And another: He sat at the table and wondered if she would appear. He remembers the table and sets down his cup. _the liquid is sweet, and afterwards, almonds_. The story of the tea fills the air. It is not finished, not even in the next room. * What does the table become for the child crouching under the table? A dungeon, a warren, the oak-grain stormy an inch from the eye: the privacy of narration, the mechanics of hiding. * I am sleep, from which everything falls as the dream rises up. You cannot hold me, not even in your strong arms. I cannot hold you, though the story might hold us. One of us chooses to leave, or what we are chooses: we have chosen a world that splinters and shifts, from molecule to atom to particle to quark. Our substance sinks into its fractured wealth while we are left behind in the poverty of our bodies. * He stares out the window past the blue lake into black woods and does not see her coming. There is the path she would take, brown needles and earth through the green grass. He sips his tea and thinks of sleep, and imagines her sleeping. * I could tell you my love is divisible into need and desire. That need reduces to past, desire to present. That the past is circumstantial, the present a problem of engineering. He sets down his cup and wanders away from the window, into the privacy of remembrance, the mechanics of excuse: _when I was a child_, he begins, and there, where no one can find him, the maps unfold in a small boy's hands: the states, the pastel countries, the earth--each sheet drawn from a greater distance, as if that were knowledge. The last shows the planets careening on the solar wind, the sun's ionic breath. * The province where this story unfolds is a sheet of blue paper. Brown lines indicate mountains. The stars of the cities are black, though they give off light. In this country a law was uncovered: we will never need more than four colors to mark off our borders. One of them is green. * The pale blue is water, a foreign country. He knw he had no right to be so happy, seeing her floating in a clear sleep. And so he stopped. He did not see her coming down the needle path. He did not see her at all. * When the story has been well-told all tasks are simpler. We have built so many empty houses; we have made the roads that lead back to them broad. When your hand moves to stroke my hair, what is the distance it travels? * I open the chest and find it empty. I open the door and the light is aimless in the room and settles nowhere. I open the book and wait for the story to begin. It will take our present and make it pass. * She is sleeping, he thinks, and then he can reach her: his fingerprints on the air, on empty space. She is sleeping, like dice in his hand: twelve chances. She is sleeping, like a cue ball: a problem of vectors, complex but foreseen. * You are here, listening, watching me pace. You will stay to find out what happens, what happens. You will want to know why. I can tell you: the story goes on and leaves us behind. The teller forgets, and the story finds a new tongue, new breath to ride on. The listener turns in his sleep and then he is gone. * She is sleeping. She is standing in the next room and picks up the scent of almonds. She has just emerged from the woods and follows the needle path down to the lake where she will stop to see her face in the surface of the water.