The willows are thinking again about thickness,slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,and day by day this imaging transforms theminto what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scalesalongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt.The magpie recites Scriabin in early morning as a mating song,and home is just a place you started out,the only place you still know how to think from,so that that place is mated to thisby necessity as well as choice,though now you have to start again from here,and it isn’t home. Venus rising in the early eveningbeside the Travelodge, as wayward and casual aswill, or beauty, or as once we willed beauty to be –though this was in retrospect, and only practicefor some other life. Do you still love poetry?Below the willows, in the dry winter reeds,banjo frogs begin a disconcerting raga,one note each, the rustling blades grow green –and it tires, the lichen-spotted tin canteensuspended in the river weeds like a turtleup for air: such a curious tiredness deflected there.And what would you give up,what would you give up, in the beautifulfalse logic of math, or Greek? In the sumof the possible, long ago in the summer grass . . .Here beside the river I close my eyes: therethe little girls lean continuously across a rustedsign that says Don’t Feed The Swansand feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings;the young cygnets, hatched from pinsand old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learningwhat has bread, and what doesn’t. What doesn’thave to do with this is all the rest:one more chance to blow out the candles and wishfor things we wished forthat wouldn’t happen unless we closed our eyes.Not the gingko or the level gaze, or the speaking voicebeneath the pillow, or the waking in the morningwith a name. But cloud – or grief, when griefis loneliness and you close your eyes. Speech,when speech is loneliness, and you close your eyes.