EASE ON DOWN. Given up the meadow patches between the trees, given up the snow patches, patches of sheep, elbow patches, patch near the pocket of the down vest disintegrating where it catches on the fences, the patch of down down in the snow on the drive — No, not anymore. We are on. We are off.

“THERE HAS ALWAYS been great fluidity of residence . . . In good times, old people might be able to stay all year . . . when people had to travel and were too feeble to carry them . . . Sometimes the house was simply pulled down as they lay on their beds; or . . . smothered (‘a soft death’) . . . They informed the deceased that he was now dead and should go away . . . Russian influence introduced burial in a plank-lined grave, marked by a cross and surrounded by a fence. In a little house above were placed the belongings of the deceased, especially his bedding, clothes, and the nail parings and hair combings he had saved.”

MY NEW DIGS, between milepost thirtyfive and the Jack Creek bridge (Jacksina), a bridge that Jim helped build mid-seventies, not long after he moved here, so he says, between dropping off the mail and picking up a dozen eggs. Vicki calls it : Cluckingham Palace. And these, the new friends. Eddy, Al, and twenty two layers; fifteen rabbits; six beavers; twentyone Dall sheep; a problem bear.

BEFORE HERE I took my money from the ice. Told the people, look. They turned their heads, their recognitions, reconsiderations, dangled from their wrists, in little digital screens. The price of a tour guide. I tried saying thank you. Anyone hear?

THAT HOLLOW TONE, tubs softly banging into each other, not metal quite, duller, where the glacier falls apart, where the glacier makes a bowl of cereal but the walls of the bowl are one hundred feet high, pulsing blue when the sun fills them, and you stand on one fleck of the glacier, an island, at the rim of the bowl, so that when the glacier breaks more, and the liquid in the bowl swells, you feel it under where you are standing, also that sound.

He was terrified by the feeling that he was no longer being organized, he forgot meal-times, came home for no reason, went out in order to escape, mumbled in a half-choked voice into the telephone, which was no longer handed to him in imperious fashion by the valet.

THIS is the body, our old body, and we have shed it. After which we arrived in Michigan. We have left the pressing bodies for the bodies of trees. Where we had a scarf of smoke over our eyes, even in the mountains, smoke and dust — the burning of leaves, of bodies, of tiny plastic wrappers spilling green fire, red dust stirred by buses up off the plains — now we have traded it for scarves of distance, miles around blue, you can see forever, nobody.

WHAT makes things circle? According to our study, two things : a) At the center of the wheel, there should be a mover. b) At the center of the flag, a wind horse.

ADDENDUM to an essay on cosmogony. In the desert how does one divine eggs? How does everyone fit inside?

ONCE a loved one requested face, suggesting our sojourn was faceless. We face many things, we argue. Here, facing the truth, and then, in a boat, in a park outside Bharatpur, facing birds.

HOW it is. We find, here, that we are moved by a general power of description.

HEATHROW to Andheri, same to same.

FROM here to here. We walked past the freezing sands, askew, walking, walking past. After Lake Michigan we found a city on seven hills teetering with skyscrapers where the brown ocean leveled all. Like the strangler figs adorning trees until the trees are irrelevant, so the bamboo scaffolding threatened the clean fronts of new architecture.

HERE, a sky-harbor, a ring of brown mountains. We stage minutes before boarding [C19] a coup. Adventure, Michigan !

IN THIS singspiel they walk through a pyramid of fire and then a pyramid of water and then marry. The natural man is a birdcatcher, one of People’s one hundred sexiest. Pyramids do not concern him. Fig cake, some reasonable drink, a little wife — What else can you buy with birds?

Can you buy a birdheaded boat full of boys full of suggestions, ready to toss petals when called for? That’s what we want to know.

WE’LL say we made a ritual out of leaving. One last white time, went to the last house on the mountain nearly air, asked ourselves about history and weather and whether the little puzzles we found in a box there would keep us sharp. Ritual asks sacrifice and we thought to offer vehicles, two : a white sedan and the Cutty Sark, both full sail, both frozen.

THE holiday we keep in our mouths or in aluminum trays to catch the juice. In orchestrating such an event consider : digestive health; space on the plate; space in the eye; behind the glass what is edible; white gloves; what in Japan they eat with friends; in Peru.

LOOKING to travel, we worry first about the texture of the landing; second about the texture at the back of a child’s neck; third about the ghosts in the cabin; fourth that the Duke protect his airport, that the Duke protect all of Orange county; fifth that the sheriff stays upright on his rounds.

THREE courses make an evening and pilfering cheeses makes friends. Imagine a palate grown the size of a room in which a conference of the blind must communicate through texture and laughing and several kittens running through the table legs. Imagine the room breathing, the laughing breathing, the cheeses in the center or resting on the participants’ heads also breathing. What are the stakes? Nobody can name them because the palate has grown the size of the world.

The other thirty four courses must go unpictured. We hold those inside, do not share them with others.

PLUS : Called Omphalotus or Jack O’Lantern, they glow on trees having swallowed the light.