Surprised by Evening

i can’t be half gentle enough,

half tender enough

toward you, toward you

inarticulate, not half loving enough

BRIGHTen

the cor

ner

where      you      are!

one favorite lil portion of ole w.c.w.’s paterson.

and from charles doyle: in the yale draft, III iii is titled ‘flood.’

p. 245 the ghost of the unborn novel is a medusa-head. (in horror of it, frozen by it..)

p. 256 fox possession, fave dishes of magical foxes, from  possession: demoniacal and other: oesterreich p. 94  on a certain day at four o’clock there were to be placed in a temple sacred to foxes and situated twelve kilometers away two vessels…

p. 270 writing is a religious act:  it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and the world as they are and as they might be…it feels to intensify living:  you give more, probe, ask, look, learn and shape this: you get more: monsters, answers, color and form, knowledge.  you do it for itself first.  (italics mine)

p. 272 god’s luminous fingernail, a shut angel’s eyelid (of the new moon on its back)

Separation
By W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

From the Desire Field by Natalie Diaz

I don’t call it sleep anymore.
I’ll risk losing something new instead—

like you lost your rosen moon, shook it loose.

But sometimes when I get my horns in a thing—
a wonder, a grief or a line of her—it is a sticky and ruined
fruit to unfasten from,

despite my trembling.

Let me call my anxiety, desire, then.
Let me call it, a garden.

Maybe this is what Lorca meant
when he said, verde que te quiero verde—

because when the shade of night comes,
I am a field of it, of any worry ready to flower in my chest.

My mind in the dark is una bestia, unfocused,
hot. And if not yoked to exhaustion

beneath the hip and plow of my lover,
then I am another night wandering the desire field—

bewildered in its low green glow,

belling the meadow between midnight and morning.
Insomnia is like Spring that way—surprising
and many petaled,

the kick and leap of gold grasshoppers at my brow.

I am struck in the witched hours of want—

I want her green life. Her inside me
in a green hour I can’t stop.
Green vein in her throat green wing in my mouth

green thorn in my eye. I want her like a river goes, bending.
Green moving green, moving.

Fast as that, this is how it happens—
soy una sonámbula.

And even though you said today you felt better,
and it is so late in this poem, is it okay to be clear,
to say, I don’t feel good,
to ask you to tell me a story
about the sweet grass you planted—and tell it again
or again—

until I can smell its sweet smoke,
leave this thrashed field, and be smooth.

appears here.