1.

At home in this rustic valley: swifts
and bees, trilliums and buddleia.
Mud daubers bob for shady corners,
in crumbling walls, to build their homes in.
Liberties and Allemandes
pucker up in the shade of home trees.
On the cold shoulders of extinct volcanos
glaciers grind their cornerstones
to dust which stains chill rivulets,
that spring from glacier’s lips,
ecru. Soon gorgeous whitewater
they empty into Trask and Yazoo,
Vistula and Amazon. Undiluted Prussian to
the almost transparent of Murakami Ryu;
to the blues of the Yamuna at Prayag,
where brown Ganges meets the Saraswati.
As a transportation bureaucracy
they haul numberless crushed stones;
they support barges, liners and water skis;
and reflect a thing almost no one else reflects on:
the filthy undersides of bridges.
When they rise to predicted flood states,
they ferry in great excess of their gross tonnage.
Naked, mud-colored and ravenous,
they might denude a few homes, a village.
All share one fate and drain — most go quietly —
into open ocean. It absorbs them all,
even the eminence grise, like a suppository.

2.

I love all places I am from
but I am nowhere now.
Are these words words I put into your mouth,
or are they my own? Here, even
the sirens that rock the siestas are alien.
From the dock I watch — are they terns? —
fish in seas of tourmaline and jetsam.
Fry that school between the pilings
flash like change on baize,
and, after dark, on the balcony, it’s easier to pretend
since waves sound more or less the same
the world over: like traffic. Your name
is always on the tip of my tongue
between parentheses of breathing out and breathing in.
Since we must tend to the forsaken,
must strive to enlighten all sentient beings,
must never ridicule what others hold sacred,
I accept the call to serve,
which is so much less arduous than loving.
We are in agreement about this,
but how to know whether suffering
is different in kind or by degree?
Was it a golden age when all combat was hand to hand?
Have you seen them, Gaul and Trojan, Pict and
Tutsi?
Gone down on one knee
with a neat part from a machete?
The bull we must take by the horns
has a human body.

3.

The blue hour: laurels across the yard
look like decor in an aquarium;
the Empress tree displays its violet blossoms;
first headlights case the street
as my Olympia unfolds her tattooed wings,
licks and flashes her kittenish teeth,
the pearly gates of my oasis.
Parmaginino would give her neck
to any nymph, every Magdelene;
Correggio has caught her
better than the paparazzi
in deep canoodle, in flagrante
with Zeus’s avid cloud —
the tongues of lightning have
gone upriver, into the Jaws of Life,
(so much is hidden, and so tastefully) —
God forbid that it would be any other way.
With a beehive against my ear
I hear the calvary massing in the pines
the hooves spark on erratics —
or are those Roman candles tracers? —
remains from the reign of her blue eyes.
What waits in that milky Greenland amber
but carbon dioxide and diatoms?
The lighted sign at the Baptist church announces
“How to Protect Your Family From Porn.”
I wait to hear you blink
before I return the phone to its cradle.