We go to a party mainly of Indian diplomats.

The counterterrorism specialist writes poetry.

The cultural attaché plays bridge.

The Chinese waiter pours and pours.

The Baba becomes our topic.  To a skeptic

he produced a miracle involving a handkerchief

whose four corners acquired the odors

of the four different flowers

the skeptic sequentially imagined.

On his way home the skeptic pulled out the kerchief

and asked his rickshaw-person to smell

and he smelled the four flowers,

but couldn’t name the fourth,

a rare orchid the skeptic himself had smelled just once.

Vikram mentions his visit to another spiritualist,

who knew things she couldn’t have known.

He knows he can’t explain it.

The Ambassador to Uzbekistan, here on a holiday,

asks why the Baba rides in a new Rolls,

produces rings from thin air

to befuddle his well-educated critics,

and does nothing for the poor.

.

We’re all reasonable people, Horatios to our toenails.

The Baba might ask, If all the poor had gold rings

would they stop being poor?

Before long we turn to politics –

education – language – math –

the raw diet – since after all

being puzzled is quickly tiresome

and the food wonderful

as any anodyne.

It, too, is a step and a leap;

small, giant;

man and mankind.

It peers up at the moon

and winks

at what got us there,

what keeps us

where we are.

Its breath is the speed of light;

its trajectory the space

of heavens;

its mission to launch

the unexplored, the alien;

to sight the soul that orbits

just out of reach

of human hands.

To finally land.

 In which flightless connotes something of injury, not mere disability;

In which mulberry speaks only of the fleshly aspirations of silk worms;

In which goat’s milk may also be strained and sullied and purified for silk;

In which the goat’s rectangular pupils may open out, their gaze panoramic;

In which the sweetness of a persimmon may be said to be the twin of deskwork;

In which the calm of dragonflies may be attributed to their three, six-way hookups;

In which rune means both poem and prayer, dashed stone and slashed symbol;

In which drawings mean everything they can be allowed to mean, and fail still;

In which words do no better; in which neither milk nor love mean what they meant;

In which silk is art or parachute; in which persimmons live and die by the wood;

In which I go from desk to trees and back, my life already six to thirty times longer

than the span of an aquatic insect’s; my flight time a drastic fraction, despite this;

In which even a purple fruit’s life is taken up with flying, by falling; in which

my falling is also my flying; in which all I want is falling, and all I fight;

In which flight is not metaphor; in which like flight is not simile;

In which goats outrun me and out-fly me, and always will.

Here the bottom falls away, a man

in Mackinaw and ski mask

cranking an auger into the Mississippi 

tells the man and woman watching him,

and in his fifty years of ice fishing

the river has never let anyone

come out this far.  These two step across

a pressure ridge, bantering.  A cicatrice. 

No, a caulking bead.  Ice mole, they agree. 

While back on shore their friends—like them,

home from college—gather driftwood

for a reunion fire.  The only open water’s

a streak in the center of the channel.

I know a story about the river,

he tells her.  Back in the thirties a drifter

chased onto the ice by rail-yard bulls   

fell through, and the following spring

the sheriff dragging the bottom hooked

something that tossed his boat around

like a plastic bob until the line

burned through his gloves and he let go.

From here they can see the new ice making up.

Imagine, she says, how crystal

by crystal the lattices form, hexagons

and stars linking and layering, some

tearing away, lost, while others grow

by stronger valences to narrow

the actual black of current:  a beauty

that leaves them frightened.  They link arms

feeling the river pull its weight

to draw them out.  Someone calls their names

but they’ve forgotten the shore,

its being something other than the river. 

Who are those waving us toward them? he thinks              

aloud, then has to laugh at himself.                                             

Who are these coming back? she replies,

They say nothing more the rest of the way,

though once or twice each turns

to look back at where they’ve been.

They join the others around driftwood aflame

with talk of majors and required courses.

It’s raining and autumn. Outside

everything dark crushes color

with blows of wind and branches.

The perfect setting for a day

inside with wool & wine, and seclusion—

that desired kind.

I’ve learned the plucks of a banjo

can rhythm the scratch of tree limbs.

A light Béla Fleck—soft haphazardness,

the soundtrack for fall and forgetting.

Only a squirrel—the culprit of a rasping,

a sound closer to pines scraping

house shingles, painted wood siding—

grips the window screen, scuttles

to the pane, back and up, clings

to the mesh with vampire-like claws.

A voyeur wanting in

in the worst way.

I know the act of clinging

has no scent, no sound—it’s static,

but still this house reeks of dead fruit: pears

spotted and moldy, fuzzed to their stems.

Is it a law of nature that everything

empty must fill again?

All week, I packed and sealed,

stuffed suits into bags but folded

the towels I’d later unfold, wrap around

my clean arms and shoulders.

A temporary comfort, like wool & merlot

and that myth of solitude.

 Please don’t give me, Lord, the thing I covet:

silence silken as a candleflame,

or blank and pregnant as the moon

on which I might imagine any face

or none.  Resist my wish

for cool white walls, windows flung open,

the afternoon hush edged with birdsong. 

Give me again and again

this rattle of wind-spun trashcans,

the schoolbus with its screechy brakes,

two dogs poised at the sill to listen

and bay back their urgent wisdom.

Teach me to see unmade beds,

fruit torn into and abandoned,

pith and rind, as hungers

satisfied, to look in cracks

for what I step, unseeing, over:

rice grains, spilled beads, a lost needle, a burr,

and dust balls spun of nothing but nostalgia

of shed skin for a body, any body.

 You knead the dough until numb,

divide it into small balls and stamp it,

leaving marks of the Holy Trinity

branded into the bread’s flesh.

Thank God for flour, for hands,

for breath.

Kneel in front of the fire

and slide His body in,

until fragrant, with a crisp crust.

Fill the air with incense.

Pray. Pray.

Pair each pita with a lit candle

so the dead can see their way.

Next to it, balance a boiled egg,

a cube of sheep cheese,

red grapes.

You give me the food:

May it be for the souls of our dead.

Bogdaproste, I say,

and the bread changes hands.

May it be received.

From the scent of basil in her bosom,

you know your young mother Ioana

has entered the room,

and, when you hear the sound of water,

your drowned brother George has arrived.

The dead have come to eat, chat,

find out what’s new.

They sit around us in the empty chairs,

share a watermelon bite,

and watch me, a serious child

scrutinizing the frankincense smoke.

You tell them all about the garden

and how the kids have grown.

They ask if you’re happy

and you’re silent,

hands folded in your lap,

as you listen to the day drip,

this holy day

when the graves part

and the dead come to visit.

                      – ”This morning will take some song.”

Long ago, life wrecked the dark’s perfection. Yet that perfection can return,

though words pass through us now like light through a leaf,

and one has to imagine each thing

like a kissed face. Butterfly wings: eyelids of the dead

that flutter open

in a daydream—

a flight that makes one wince . . . .Vanishing doesn’t tell the truth longer. Nor

the next day with its wobbly table at the filling station where self-servers

pump their own. The lover’s sorrow hovers

like a glass globe above a spike, treasuring within it a fragrance. Does

anybody really think their touch will send it plummeting,

shattering a prison? On the other side of an opened window, night is smaller

than the fear of those who veer among its corners. Time rains on each place

and the moments run off and pool where? If we could understand the

existence, say,

of just nine frogs staring from a rose . . . we who ruin the body’s limits (so

lamented and inspiring) . . .

The waters rise through waters, sink through waters . . .

It’s not accurate to say we take the fury that diminishes us, or that it’s mixed

with the daily dirt caking the fingers stuck in childhood’s mouth. The

meanings of human life are never disappearing,

only disappearing for us who can’t change with them.

We’ve studied, but who can prepare for the cores turned inside out, for our

own shadows

plunged into rapids yet remaining?

A yard

overrun with rabbits lazily hopping in the dusk –

as it always has been – here and there stopping to chew.

Holes everywhere. One would be wise

to stop there, when it comes to searching for an answer to the future,

but I am not one

to stop. Hop.

Hop. It’s easier to have a past, to look back. Earlier today,

walking along the road I regularly walk, I happened upon a rabbit tail.

Whatever being in pursuit of the rabbit got just the tail, came up empty, spit it out.

Or consumed everything but the tail end. There’s a future that makes me jumpy. 

Here I am

hopping

around the yard.

And there are my kids perched at the window nibbling,

watching me. The back light of their TV

and the shifting images make me think

of them standing in a lightning storm.

Lightning, a row of little Frankensteins,

ghostly figures needing to be charged. That image goes to bed with me.

I don’t remember my dreams,

but I sometimes drive to the thrift store

for no other reason than to look at the remains of lives attempted and given up or gone –

just to fill them in again.

This afternoon I was confronted there. A beautiful woman –

why is she always a beautiful woman? –

whose flowered dress I had already begun to eat, said, “I know what’s on your mind.” 

Another sales person acting as if she knows exactly what I need, I thought,

but I’ll be damned. “You must be some kind of clairvoyant,” I quipped, 

and as a matter of fact, she was, but she’d quit her overbooked future-telling practice

and taken back her life. She said that – “taken back my life” – with such ferocity,

after which she tried to spit out a hair, had been working it, as people do,

to the front of the lips without locating it. What had she been eating?

In her previous life, as she called it, she became only what would happen

for or to someone else.

“So what about your TV?” I asked. I meant to say future.

“I ran out and bought a new house,” she said.

“I drove here, to the thrift store, to furnish it, knowing I’ll find nothing I like,

which is exactly what I want, because I plan on leaving the house empty,

so that no one can move in.”

“Will you ever go there?” I asked.

“When will you,” is all that she kept saying, “when will you

 finish my dress?” As if I were making one, instead of chewing on it.

                                    1937

Sand in the well. Windmill turning

a dry creak on its wheel.

The water witcher walks the length

and breadth of the yard,

loosely holding

his Wünschelrute,

palms up as if in prayer.

Wasser             Wasser

Between the barn and house, the stick

jerks down hard

and straight, the muscles in his arms

pulled tight by the tug of rivers underground.

water

The air blown so light, it can’t hold.

Something jar-eyed

and bloated winding up in the corn.

whing               whing               whing

Now that we hate the sun,

we’re learning to go

deep,

to plumb

longings we didn’t know

we had,

the shadow this land casts on us,

its thirst and swale.