ON THE PREMISES always, this being Alaska, see how many ways there are to move.

Calico, tweed, the bubbling pots. I’m a long way from home

THAT SMALL red stone, there is one in every salmon. A stone but different because it vibrates — even extracted, covered in grit from the bank, even in your mouth — continues vibrating. So far upstream, how does a heart stay salty ?

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?

THE WHOLE town needs release. When summer is gone, when the metalsmith’s wife has finished with suicide, the carpenter’s son has come home after sudden hip surgery, his dancing career uncertain, and you have given up on the moose you had waded the bog after, when the most extravagant tide of the year leaves even the far rocks tilty in the naked mud — the town then comes to the water, burns their prayers in a basket, burns their losses, avoids the smoky side of the pyre the best they can. Above their basket, they might let loose some paper balloons with a fire in them, to get swallowed by the sky or by orcas. I find I have been navigating by these lately. The paper balloons, I mean.

LONELY SHOOTER, do you see ?

From “St. Francis and the Sow” by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow

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.

WHAT ARE WE if not mountains? Mount Meru, Regal Mountain, Fireweed Mountain, I had thought by looking you could make them again inside. A different inside from what you looked at before. If you were looking at a city, that would be your inside city. If you were looking at a face, that would be your inside face, projected on the screen at the front of the chest. How Hanuman shows his devotion, tears his chest open, shows Ram and Sita. On that screen, flickering between a mountain and a face. A mountain and a face and a brave indolence sallying at the corners of the image which we must ward off because a chest besieged, just the smoke from such a siege, would leave all the organs sleeping.

AMERICA!

WE STOOD, before the movie started, in the dark cinema, the whole crowd standing, mouthing to themselves an anthem, our hands quietly, one cupped in the other, in front where our laps will be when we sit down. On the screen the flag waved, in the wind from a computer, and the wheel on the flag spun. I think my uncle and my aunt besides were singing aloud. What a fine singing and from the speakers, too. We keep seeing these movies, with no idea what is supposed happen.

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.

IN ABSENTIA : Why so much missing? I’ll say it is because we were living with the hot. Perspiration shot from our temples, behind the ears, flooded out the inside of the elbows and any attempt to record taken with the flood. We found new places to sweat. We shot perspiration at each other, at our friends, then tired of the sport. I had a handkerchief for my brow, but across my neck, it turned to pulp on the second day.

My eye has become soft. And the world. Send ice.

*

Where does the hot come from? So it says.

When the heaven-dwellers, the sages, the gods performed the horse sacrifice, Shiva got no share. Why should he not? His wife demanded. Perspiration came he was so angry. He dispersed the gods, threw blood in the altar fire. The sacrifice took the form of a deer and fled. Shiva flew after. The perspiration grew a heavy droplet at the tip of his nose. Where it hit the earth, a little red man, hairy like an owl or a hawk, stormed the earth : Fever. Granted, his anger was justified, but could he not at least dilute this terrible Fever, Indra suggested. Who could withstand such energy?

And so we find the traces of Fever — sullen laterite soils, pens gone dry or missing, all maladies concerning sheeps’ livers, headaches of elephants, constipation of horses, fatigue among tigers, hiccuping among parrots, crossword puzzles left incomplete, lassitude in travelers, deafness between lovers, a certainty that the rains are laughing at you.

OUT OF the idea of constriction, three suggestive requests in order of urgency set to quiet (can you feel the rhythm burnin’, burnin’) rock in a tight blue interior, hemmed in by mist, and perched over us, Jesus in a peely pink frame, a few dried grasses in offering.

WE ARE BAFFLED.

FOR instance, beside the dozen fish each night under the candle the ladies sell on our street. Or, next to the fish, the anvil of pork under a screen. Or, the little stand selling cookies and mobile phone accessories. Between every seller is a half-booth, sometimes two half-booths. In every half-booth you might place a bet. They will not tell you what you bet on. You bet on bows and arrows, a dozen bows, a thousand arrows. These men will everyday, for your benefit, sometimes without looking, shoot the sunset air. These men do not make a sound.