Brenda Hillman

In a side booth at MacDonald's before your music class
you go up and down in your seat like an arpeggio
under the poster of the talking hamburger:
...

—Once more the poem woke me up,
the dark poem. I was ready for it;
he was sleeping,
...

After Ed Sanders
We'd been squatting near the worms
in the White House lawn, protesting
the Keystone Pipeline =$=$=$=$=$=$=>>;
i could sense the dear worms
through the grillwork fence,
twists & coils of flexi-script, remaking
the soil by resisting it    ...    
After the ride in the police van
telling jokes, our ziplocked handcuffs
pretty tight,
when the presiding officer asked:

— Do you have any tattoos?
— Yes, officer, i have two.
— What are they?
— Well, i have a black heart on my inner thigh &
an alchemical sign on my ankle.
— Please spell that?
— Alchemical. A-L-C-H-E-M-I-C-A-L.
— What is that?
— It's basically a moon, a lily, a star & a flame.

He started printing in the little square

MOON, LILY, STAR


Young white guy, seemed scared. One blurry
tattoo on his inner wrist    ...     i should have asked
about his, but couldn't
cross that chasm. Outside, Ash
Wednesday in our nation's capital. Dead
grass, spring trees
about to burst, two officers
beside the newish van. Inside,
alchemical notes for the next time —
...

Each day the job gets up
And rubs its eyes

We are going to live on in dry amazement

Workers push the granite bed under the avenue

Bed of the married
The re- the pre-married

Making a form as forms become infinite

The scrapings scraping

Graywhacke chert

People wait for their bumpy little pizzas
Theories of theories in gravity voices

Melpomene goddess of tragedy bathes

Mostly the bride never the bridesmaid

Angel food in whole foods

Consider Tanguy whose lunar responses to childhood
Made everything a horizon

Those walking upside down don't know what to think

The finch engineering itself to deep spring

Or you life tired of being cured

How many layers
Of giving up are there

One of it

Two of everything in the arc you save
...

A brenda is missing—where is she?
Summon the seeds & weeds, the desert whooshes. Phone the finch
with the crowded beak; a little pretenda
is learning to read
in the afternoon near the cactus caves. Near oleander & pulpy
caves with the click-click of the wren & the shkrrrr of the thrasher,
a skinny pretenda is learning
to read till the missing brenda
is found. Drip of syllables like olives near the saguaro.
Nancy Drew will find the secret in raincoats & wednesdays
& sticks. Nancy whose spine is yellow
or blue will find the brenda in 1962,

Nancy who has no mother,
who takes suggestions from her father & ignores them.

Gleam goes the wren ignoring the thorn. They cannot tell the difference.
Click of the smart dog's nails on linoleum.
Nancy bends over the clues,
of brenda's locket & dress. Word by word
between syllables a clue. Where has the summer gone, the autumn—
are they missing too? Maybe Nancy
will parse the secret & read the book report on Nancy Drew:
"neat pretty sly cute." Syllable by syllable
& still no brenda! Nancy
puts her hand to her forehead; is the missing
girl in the iron bird? is the clue to the girl in the locket?
...

The last ice age had been caused by a wobble.
After it passed they made houses from stars;

Visitors would peer in
And see the tongs not slipping,

Roomsized pebbles having been moved far.

It's like this more
When we speak than when we write;

Loving thus we have been
Loved by ground,

The word being
A box with four of its corners hidden;

Everything else is round.
...

The earth had wanted us all to itself.
The mountains wanted us back for themselves.
The numbered valleys of serpentine wanted us;
that's why it happened as it did, the split
as if one slow gear turned beneath us. . .
Then the Tuesday shoppers paused in the street
and the tube that held the trout-colored train
and the cords of action from triangular buildings
and the terraced gardens that held camelias
shook and shook, each flower a single thought.

Mothers and children took cover under tables.
I called out to her who was my life.
From under the table—I hid under the table
that held the begonia with the fiery stem,
the stem that had been trying to root, that paused
in its effort—I called to the child who was my life.
And understood, in the endless instant
before she answered, how Pharaoh's army, seeing
the ground break open, seeing the first fringed
horses fall into the gap, made their vows,
that each heart changes, faced with a single awe
and in that moment a promise is written out.

However we remember California later
the earth we loved will know the truth:
that it wanted us back for itself
with our mighty forms and our specific longings,
wanted them to be air and fire but they wouldn't;
the kestrel circled over a pine, which lasted,
the towhee who loved freedom, gathering seed
during the shaking lasted, the painting released
by the wall, the mark and hook we placed
on the wall, and the nail, and the memory
of driving the nail in, these also lasted—
...

We bury the sparrows of Europe
with found instruments,
their breasts light as an ounce of tea
where we had seen them off the path,
their twin speeds of shyness & notched wings
near the pawnbroker's house by the canal,
in average neighborhoods of the resisters,
or in markets of princely delphinium & flax,
flying from awnings at unmarked rates
to fetch crumbs from our table half-spinning
back to clefs of grillwork on external stairs
we would descend much later;

in rainy neighborhoods of the resisters
where streets were taken one by one,
where consciousness is a stair or path,
we mark their domains with notched sticks
of hickory or chestnut or ash
because our cities of princely pallor
should not have unmarked graves.
Lyric work, flight of arch, death bridge
to which patterned being is parallel:
they came as if from the margins
of a painting, their average hearts half-spinning
our little hourglass up on the screen.
...

The labeled bins on the California hillside
catch the glint and quarter-glint of passing cars.
Families pull up with their interesting trash
and start unloading: Here, sweetheart,
this goes over in Newspaper. The bundle
hits with a thud. Diet soda cans
spin almost noiselessly down, and the sun-
permitting bottles from a day's pleasure
are tossed into Mixed Glass by the children
who like to hear the smash, unknowable, chaotic,
as matter greets itself and starts to change.

What mystery is inside a thing! If we peered
into the bin, we could see it waiting there,
could believe everything is alive and specific
and personal, could tell by the tilt of one
bottle against the next that it's difficult
to be singular, to have identity, to keep
an outline safe in the terrors of space.
Even the child knows this. Bye, bottle! she shouts,
tossing it in; and the bottle lies there
in the two o'clock position, temporarily itself,
before being swept into the destiny of mixture. . .

And what if some don't want to. What if some items
in the piles of paper, the orange and blue
envelopes from a magazine sweepstakes, numbers
pressing through the cloudy windows
with our names, some among those pale sheets curled
with moisture, would rather stay as they are.
It's spring; we've thrown away mistakes—
tax forms, recipes, tennis-ball-sized
drafts of poems—that which was blank
shall be made blank again—but what if
that failed letter wants to be a failure,
not go back to pulp, and thought .. .
Or across the parking lot, where light insists
on changing the dull cans, a few cans don't want
to be changed, though they should want to,
shouldn't they, should want to be changed
by light, light which is called sweet reason,
honeyed, spectra, magnitude, light that goes
from the parking lot looking helpless
though it is matter that has been betrayed. . .

All afternoon the bins are carried off
by those who know about where things should go,
who are used to the clatter the cans make,
pouring out; and the families, who believed change
would heal them are pulling away in their vans,
slightly embarrassed by that which refused . . .
The bins fill again with hard substances,
the hills bear down with their fugitive gold,
the pampas grass bending low to protect
what was briefly certain and alive with hope.
...

Often visitors there, saddened
by lack of trees, go out
to a promontory.

Then, backed by the banded
sunset, the trail
of the Conquistadores,

the father puts on the camera,
the leather albatross,
and has the children

imitate saguaros. One
at a time they stand there smiling,
fingers up like the tines of a fork

while the stately saguaro
goes on being entered
by wrens, diseases, and sunlight.

The mother sits on a rock,
arms folded
across her breasts. To her

the cactus looks scared,
its needles
like hair in cartoons.

With its arms in preacher
or waltz position,
it gives the impression

of great effort
in every direction,
like the mother.

Thousands of these gray-green
cacti cross the valley:
nature repeating itself,

children repeating nature,
father repeating children
and mother watching.

Later, the children think
the cactus was moral,
had something to teach them,

some survival technique
or just regular beauty.
But what else could it do?

The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.
...

The shoe repairman works behind the married shoes,
his whole hand inside the boot he's shining,
everything cozy in the glass displays, laces paired
on gravel he's spread out in the window, shoes
placed as though they're walking, and beside them
propped up, the wooden tongues of shoe horns, poised
to serve the inanimate world ... He comes out mildly
attentive, soft accent, possibly a Scottish
childhood, possibly sheep to tend ... Clear day,
first summer divorced in Berkeley, a time of seamless, indescribable grief; he waits kindly in his blue apron,
fingering the well-worn inner sole, and I am grateful
for those who serve us knowing nothing of our lives ...

*

The cleaner waits behind the silver bell;
he's from Cambodia and has free Christian literature
on the counter. He greets me with pleasant chatter,
searches through the coats, some left for years,
he says; they make a soft blue whistle as they circulate
on the ovals like the ones under those automatic boats.
As the clothes pass, little checks and prints under
the whooshing of motion, I see my husband's coat—
how long will I call him my husband—like an old friend
passing by quickly not bothering to greet me. Odd now,
I don't have to pick it up, the serious plaid will go
around between the women's suits and stay all night. . .

*

I watch the young butcher flipping over the young
chicken: he takes one wing and sort of spins it,
first on its back, flinging the trimmed, watery
lemon-colored fat into the trash, then before
he starts on the legs he puts his hand so deeply in
that the finger comes out the neck ... The other butcher
sets the slab of beef under the saw: the riveting
intricate swirl as the dead flesh pulls away;
he goes off, shouts short words from the deep freeze—
to me or to the carcass hanging by the shank?—
I can wait, but the spaces can't, there's a slight
ticking, then the carcass swings and swings ...
Somehow I thought we would know everything
through the flesh. Perhaps. But my days have become
spirit. The young butcher splits the chicken
down the back, seems to enjoy the crack of the knife
as it enters the bone, so I try to. Housewives lean
against the cool glass to convey holiday news and he
responds without really looking up; I love that.

*

oh Berkeley summer mornings, aren't they—
what? past the French Hotel, the glint of tiny spoons
so briefly and soberly allowed to rest on white saucers,
the plums just about over, the agapanthus—"lilies of denial"—
in the center dividers, blooming, or just about to—
like me, hearty and hesitant, not wanting to write it,
not wanting to ruin the perfection of the poem
by writing it . . . At the dentist, the little mirror,
the dinosaur prong is put into the mouth. Mouth:
the first darkness. Nearby: the mobile with straw
eyeless fishes. The dentist will go home to her family,
having briefly reached inside the visible mystery
and found nothing ... I imagine Wisdom in the text
is like this, creating the cosmos from the mind of God,
looking interested and competent; she touches
the physical place with her prong, and the pain shines ...

(—a man told me I better think
about my ‘system.'
Oh dear! I better
think about my ‘system'—!)
...

I passed through nature

into the next. Children

running in unsupervised shadows.

Last century's fountains learning

not to lie. Risk

to identify with only

one element since one

will die but in

the summer air around

each thought, something is

built and avoided. You

go through an arch

and aren't the arch,

just infinity of form,

curve's curve of becoming,

a phrase tracking it

to future's celadon relief.

As others dressed as

others we were supposed

to meet. Citizens walked

here without disappointment, seeing

no statue or palace

with eleven axes, patient

in the mindless heat—
...

~~ & thus you entered

a forest of solitudes

where in this great

sense your life had

been pursued, till like

a shadow breaking off

a rising body, a

need hovered & grew.

Some lined feature of

another fate strives to

be met, sits low

& upright. Those qualities

which had been energy

or grace past pain

wove from the nerves

a nest or instinct.

Your calms are interesting.

Write to us during

this terrible government. A

universe coughs blue &

draws a twiceness from

the mitred now, while

your garden hand spells

the inexhaustible forms~~


FOR ELIZABETH ROBINSON
...

The problem
of time. Of there not being
enough of it.

My girl came to the study
and said Help me;
I told her I had a time problem
which meant:
I would die for you but I don't have ten minutes.
Numbers hung in the math book
like motel coathangers. The Lean
Cuisine was burning
like an ancient city: black at the edges,
bubbly earth tones in the center.
The latest thing they're saying is lack
of time might be
a "woman's problem." She sat there
with her math book sobbing—
(turned out to be prime factoring: whole numbers
dangle in little nooses)
Hawking says if you back up far enough
it's not even
an issue, time falls away into
'the curve' which is finite,
boundaryless. Appointment book,
soprano telephone—
(beep End beep went the microwave)

The hands fell off my watch in the night.
I spoke to the spirit
who took them, told her: Time is the funniest thing
they invented. Had wakened from a big
dream of love in a boat
No time to get the watch fixed so the blank face
lived for months in my dresser,
no arrows
for hands, just quartz intentions, just the pinocchio
nose (before the lie)
left in the center; the watch
didn't have twenty minutes; neither did I.
My girl was doing
her gym clothes by herself; (red leaked
toward black, then into the white
insignia) I was grading papers,
heard her call from the laundry room:
Mama?
Hawking says there are two
types of it,
real and imaginary (imaginary time must be
like decaf), says it's meaningless
to decide which is which
but I say: there was tomorrow-
and-a-half
when I started thinking about it; now
there's less than a day. More
done. That's
the thing that keeps being said. I thought
I could get more done as in:
fish stew from a book. As in: Versateller
archon, then push-push-push
the tired-tired around the track like a planet.
Legs, remember him?
Our love—when we stagger—lies down inside us. . .
Hawking says
there are little folds in time
(actually he calls them wormholes)
but I say:
there's a universe beyond
where they're hammering the brass cut-outs .. .
Push us out in the boat and leave time here—

(because: where in the plan was it written,
You'll be too busy to close parentheses,
the snapdragon's bunchy mouth needs water,
even the caterpillar will hurry past you?
Pulled the travel alarm
to my face: the black
behind the phosphorous argument kept the dark
from being ruined. Opened
the art book
—saw the languorous wrists of the lady
in Tissot's "Summer Evening." Relaxed. Turning
gently. The glove
(just slightly—but still:)
"aghast";
opened Hawking, he says, time gets smoothed
into a fourth dimension
but I say
space thought it up, as in: Let's make
a baby space, and then
it missed. Were seconds born early, and why
didn't things unhappen also, such as
the tree became Daphne. . .

At the beginning of harvest, we felt
the seven directions.
Time did not visit us. We slept
till noon.
With one voice I called him, with one voice
I let him sleep, remembering
summer years ago,
I had come to visit him in the house of last straws
and when he returned
above the garden of pears, he said
our weeping caused the dew. . .

I have borrowed the little boat
and I say to him Come into the little boat,
you were happy there;

the evening reverses itself, we'll push out
onto the pond,
or onto the reflection of the pond,
whichever one is eternal
...

Titled after Satie
I.
Three pears ripen
On the ledge. Weeks pass.
They are a marriage.

The middle one's the conversation
The other two are having.
He is their condition.

Three wings without birds,
Three feelings.
How can they help themselves?

They can't.
How can they stay like that?
They can.

II.
The pears are consulting.
Business is bad this year,

D'Anjou, Bartlett.
They are psychiatrists,

Patient and slick.
Hunger reaches the hard stem.

It will get rid of them.

III.
The pears are old women;
They are the same.
Slight rouge,
Green braille dresses,
They blush in unison.
They will stay young.
They will not ripen.
In the new world,
Ripeness is nothing.
...

In movies when the hero is about to die,
He scatters a few phrases in a place like this,
Hoping the words will come up again
Immortal, or the grasses will reach out for him
As now they do for us.

Someone has planted a row of little trees
To stop the wind. Instead they've learned
To bend like the elect
In one direction only; they know
The sea will shatter them.

Isn't it always like this?
Something uncontrollable becomes the hero,
Taking off its dress, the ice plants
Sunburn from the center out
So we can see that their deaths

Of splendid rust and yellow are not ours,
We are allowed again the glare
Of the sand, the druid hills,
The grasses brushing the legs, though
Just to have felt it once would have been enough.
...

—So, one by one I pull the lice from your red hair.
One by one I try to split them with my fingernails;

no use, they hold on
as they were taught to. Still, they glisten
like heavenly sparks in the morning light
of the bathroom.

I have to pull extra hard on many of them,
use the turquoise, fine-toothed comb
provided by the pharmacy.
They hold on with all their strength:
each has its individual hair to love,
each pus-colored creature
has a genius plan for not leaving you.

I fling the lice out in the air,
thinking how the world despises them,
the other mothers of Berkeley,
and the teachers who have not appreciated their beauty.

And though I've had to poison them again,
I've always understood them,
I also wanted to get that close,
wanted to cling to you in just that manner,
even go back to heaven with you so we won't
have to address this problem of the separate
you-and-me,
of outer and inner.

I hope we will have our same bodies there
and the lice will have their same bodies,
that each hopeful tear-shaped egg
will be allowed to cling forever, not be pulled
between love's destiny
and a lesser freedom—
...

—i pull the hate
on a rope ladder to the resting zone…
H
H
H
pull the A on down.
A
A
A
Put that sick A to bed. Get well, A. Pinched
fire. Bring the T down now

T
T
T
Roman cross before the Christian thing.
Bump bump. Put that T to bed. Put
that Garamond T
to bed before we kill someone with it. Such as:
Whack-whack. Weapon contractors in Virginia.
Whack. Get well T. Won't kill with you.
Now. Being
able to breathe for the E,
breathe into the prongs. Slide on its back.




Put the E to bed. Get well, E.
Weird shapes around campfires
below the mind.
Tiny fires with hurt earth spirits
as in Aeschylus. Resting letters now
so they can live—
...

i.

—& humans walked to the edge of the sand
through a bank of verbena & fog;
they thought they'd never get over
the deaths, but they were starting to. Worry
about money rested in their phones. Talk of
candidates had stalled. Some sang. Grays of

objects rested in their packs. They had come
to the edge with children or with friends. Big
nothing quieted the crows. Wings of dried ink.
The snake had gone back to the hills, to velvet &
the brian-grasses; it digested a mouse near its spine.
Some sang. The fox went back & would never

meet the snake except through the ampersand.
The memory of failure failed for an hour. Some
sang. The future was a cosmic particle
seen once a long time ago. Those who had tried
too often walked with those who had yet to try
as doubt can walk beside a radical hope—



ii.

some had cancer some walked outside
some were breaking up a few

were getting by some walked past
pines to their hearts' desire thinking
of sex or seeds a few asked

where nature is bonnard-blue thistles

yarrow leaves narrowly out to sea

axio-fog of August down from bluffs

others rolled through dune grass some
rested depressed a few made sand-

cities sandwiches some went birdward
to sooty & long-billed murrelet grebe



iii.

—they had driven to the country, though as
a poet wrote The country will bring us no peace;
they took their children of light & flesh
because the sign was the sun upon the earth,
it was not toxic assets, it was not forwards or
options or swaps; the sign was not ruin upon

the sea, for the sea saved some. A caterpillar of
maybe it was the tiger moth inched along,
a few white bristles sticking up, bristles taller
than the country, & Abronia latifolia's roots would
not live past the country or the blue-eyed darner
& the meadow hawk with its three life stages…

By the sea the orbweaver rappelling beside
the fleabane was bolder than the country,
it didn't see underlying leverage or hedging,
didn't see collateralized debt obligations & rates,
or see the probably 100 trillion traded on
what is called futures while the mountain lion that

has a small future took her young through the O in
October. Human children rolled through dune grass,
they had a simple laughter in the country, in sand
so much older than the country, they had a little
gladness for that day while the sign, the shadow
of death, passed over them but death did not—



iv.

little litter on the littoral shore

where first peoples set tule boats

walkers makers of a burn tangle

left that ocean before writing nations

whose words are lost thick low

mats now named beachweed or heliotrope

horned sea rocket When John Muir

a sweeping man settled farther inland

that family farmer grew peach trees

o ever now after such sorrow

we dreamed a red ladder of

birth & death being set down





v.

The sun paused. It was greeting the soul
of the day. The clouds gathered past money,
they were cumuli- & cirri-, they were glauc-
& grise & gray. The friends talked
with their thumbs on the tiny machines
& some walked or drank & some loved.

On the mountain in summer
they had seen serpentine & saw it again
today, black green not the color of money
as if a serpent had slid beneath the birth
of the sea & brought the burned
waves to the rock. The friends

had violence in them & they had
silence too. By the waves the silence
sounded like swswswswsw or ____ ,
it sounded like ''''''''' or even {{{{{.
Lichen hung in hashtags & the wind
was braver than sports. Slowly they

forgot the grief opening of the book
& when they saw the secret serpentine
they knew what could be both you
& not you, that snake & fox &
word would live with the hooded,
the ring-necked, the marbled, the blue—



vi.

Otters swam in the lagoon,
the gates opened in the reeds,
no suffering between the myths or
silver smelt diminishing. No metal or
spilled oil where human hair had been
used to gather it… Otters have one million
little hairs per inch of skin so when
between the reeds they passed they did not

hurt with cold. Far out to sea 10,000 whales
swam without the humans.
The humans breathed when they saw them
not as dire. Liso- & lati- & beside. They stood
in Abronia latifolia, cries of E or I when they
saw the whales. Harbingers, Thoreau might
have said. One tall boy named Finn saw three.
There was aggression among large mammals

but no merrill lynching, no goldman saching,
no bankers' greed or quantitative easing
no negative interest rate environment
yielding minus zero so students pay to be
in debt. There was none of that. Some willow
buds bobbed in the lagoon, kelp bobbed
between gray & brown otters' heads in winter
cress. Their happiness was research.




vii.

The humans had come in strong boats
when continents were closer.
That is the theory in some accounts.
The continents floated in & suddenly
naked-new bodies arrived in buckled dunes & radiating
grasses. When some made love in the wooden place
by the sea in autumn her hands were
always cold even in thick warm
fibers & out in the charismatic dusk,
under the harvest moon set in the history of
arrivals, in browns & gray of winter fog &
maybe in the amount of time
it took for the in- side of them to become
warm, jazz poured in as if from distant fires on
the west shore, as if in animated orange code. Centuries
passed. When sex was delicious one woman thought, here we are
at a national seashore, almost nothing goes well for the nation
but land held in common past dominance & greed
which seemed like a real plan as if love were free



viii.

& heard the reeds hissing when
Drake stepped on land creeks went
below the new dead in slim
fog could not be comforted

dusky Chlorogalum pomeridianum the "soap plant"

blooms on dry hillsides white-crowns nearby

cloudy light flowers wiry blue lines

Miwok dug up hidden bulbs used

dye from leaves for tattoos used

raw bulbs for lather from cooked
bulbs made a sweet starch then

with the paste they glued arrows



ix.

In spring, when the field starts to think & the invisibles
are relaxed, sounds let themselves out to the left. Crows
& apples sanction their appeal & humans go out
almost to the Point & see the baby elk that have
have fuzzy fur on the horns, grasses through which other
grasses push. Yellow mustard flowers like paintings in
Europe. The elk are standing out at the precipice
past dread or Thursdays & the humans start to feel

pleasure. Some humans don't want elk on their land
& put up signs with poems: LET'S PROTECT/
BOTH ELK AND COW/ TIME TO BUILD / ELK FENCES NOW.
Humans want to have sex anytime they want but don't want
the elk to have sex anytime & accuse male elk of
drinking water before sex, even humans who might
take property from humans in other countries think
male elk are being unreasonable for drinking water,

but the humans love beauty & can be released from
their positions because so many have doubts about
doubts about what is called the natural world; far below,
the sea lions are stretched out like rug samples,
& the humans tarry, looking down at high waves crashing,
green with its leader into gray, crashing over what is lost;
the humans name what is lost while going home where
they live in violence & hope & inconceivable longing—



x.

In woods where the spirits stood

among the signs past usnea hanging
in wet bishop pines humans heard

the loud instances of wide hawk

A red-tail flew over them

E-E-E & the anti-going furred one
crawled past brown feet of chanterelles

waited while one of the hawk's

perfect E's flew to the sky

& found the end of time



xi.

They had come to the coast as they
had come to songs as they had come
to poetry. When they were odd
children they went to the sea & saw
the bronze stems in the sand, dune grass
where the shaman starved & hurt sank
quietly. The parents were anxious, so
the children tried to act normal to keep them

calm. They didn't know about threatened
corals or the sorrow of coastal towns.
The children tried to act normal in school
when teachers brought packets of poetry.
On holidays, violent games with the cousins
& the sea grew more toxic &
more lovely. Now they are grown, they're
trying to feel a little less terrible

about everything. They might take a poem
to the beach for a birthday or a wedding.
Pelicans fly in their backward Zs. Sand
is the residue of stars, edges echo eco
eco, for the house is already beside itself,
the edges not the center; the children
laugh as they make the sand houses, not
remembering they'll remember —




xii.

So it was that the dream went back past the signs

So it was in summer again the loved ones went out to
the sea at a quarter to dusk

The part of them that could do nothing did nothing
& the light of them walked along

Walked west forgetting not the horror but forgiving
others who were happier & the amount

When they got to the waves they gave the ashes of
the dead to the sea oh blankness cut loose
from the dream

& forgot for an hour the anger as they sat & shook
the small stones from their shoes & walked
back over the bridge of fireweed

Talking about events that mattered as the ashes were
sucked back in the tide so loss could be lost
for a while as love kept them
in company beside —



for the children & grandchildren of the seashores
...

The unknowns are up early;
they browse through the bronze
porch bells. Crows
call & late
apples blaze
toward western emptiness.
In your illness,
the edges hesitate;
like the revolt
of workers, they
will take a while…

Here comes the fond
mild winter; other
realms are noisy
& unanimous. You tap
the screen & dream
while waiting; four
kinds of forever
visit you today:
something, nothing,
everything & art,
greater than you are
& of your making—
...