The fish circle the seas a thousand times
a day, never diverging from the endless
path of blue opening up before them. 

The house is humming with many lives today.
Too drowsy even for a slice of apple
or her own glass of wine, she prepares

As far as mental anguish goes,
the old painters were no fools.
They understood how the mind,

It's the rhythm and small plosive bombs in the mouth,
on the lips of the whisperer (me) who would like
in the best of all possible worlds to rhyme

"Isn't it time I slipped my leash?"
         she thought.         For him, what was it?
A quickening. A corner he hadn't turned.

I lost the time of day about three weeks ago
right after the siesta in the trembling rain,
right after the blue dream in the saffron forest,

I fell in love with the Siberian Iris
In the garden catalog,
Slender-stemmed, indigo shading to violet,

Another feast day, and the bells are ringing.
The bells are ringing, and not more
than a handful of versts from here,

Through leaded windowpanes the light pours down
less on the holy figures than on objects
waiting to be used that tell the story:

One thing I think everyone is nostalgic for, though perhaps without being able to articulate it, is a time when literature would begin a little less abruptly, without a lot of facts about cracker-named people before you’re told who they are or why they’re there, like so many dog-wagging tails or a pair of narrating lips set chronicling by one who imagined that a tone of