Dear Low, You did it. You left the trout behind. Sunday the corn was cut down. Apple trees in the nearby orchard were felled which explains the screams I heard a week ago, and the droning of wasps. That hill was exposed this evening at sunset, reflected pink in the sky. Reminds me of the women I always saw through your eyes, their large lips and eyes, the dark thighs particularly, fields without their corn now shedding a purple light like Stevens' Hartford. And you there tonight forsaking the schoolyard we'd walk beside stopping to comment on that view of hills at our favorite wall where 'N*ggers Pandemonium' stalled on hot nights to break beer bottles for your poems' broken glass, curtains you'd pass in the dark where your wheels would splay the stars stuck to tar bubbles on the street when Hart Crane beat his words against your rhythm running down to Montford Park. **'N*ggers Pandemonium was the name of a black bar/club on 'the other side of the tracks' in a racially segregated Southern town. It was black owned and its clientele were mostly black. The bar no longer exists.

Arriving late to love the broken tower mourns its ringing ruin. Long drought of air stills the clapper. But one breath, Trembler, cracks metal. Muteness falls away. Frightened doves scatter. Annunciation of rafters: Come. Remember gaiety, how to sway. Who pulls the rope are many. Silver coin, fly up from empty fountain, renew into wishful hand a saint's pocket prayer returning.

We lay together, two wrecks, Love, wooden ships conjoined by forces too great, too objective to blame. We stretch beside a shoreline, eels play in the one rib of our opened selves, our rarer fingers share at last, gesture horizon to stars, even Sun/Moon entwine before and behind centering a presumably expanding circumference curving inwardly toward itself which is an affection, a longing, a bottom upon which even God can lay hidden from secret admirers such are mirrors whose surfaces are rarely breached. But there is reach. Many ways to say the word 'love'

This ancient tonguing betrays some fault disdaining the human world - which occurred first, the birthing or the wounding? Abjuring flesh of necessity, this, my peace, is false but the music woos, swells me up. It is my sleek, bleak hour remembering Bathsheba's girth. There is some mirth in remembering her, those skirts and veils like a cadence of sweet cakes and guilt...

and O this, this midnight stagger, nothing hurt but trembling hand shaking to dryness, the other leaning into yellow