1

I walk along the length of a stone and gravel garden
and feel without looking how the fifteen stones
appear and disappear. I had not expected the space
to be defined by a wall made of clay boiled in oil
nor to see above a series of green cryptomeria
pungent in spring. I stop and feel an April snow
begin to fall on the stones and raked gravel and see
how distance turns into abstraction desire and ordinary
things: from the air, corn and soybean fields are
a series of horizontal and vertical stripes of pure color:
viridian, yellow ocher, raw sienna, sap green. I
remember in Istanbul at the entrance to the Blue Mosque
two parallel, extended lines of shoes humming at
the threshold of paradise. Up close, it’s hard to know
if the rattle of milk bottles will become a topaz,
or a moment of throttled anger tripe that is
chewed and chewed. In the distance, I feel drumming
and chanting and see a line of Pueblo women dancing
with black on black jars on their heads; they lift
the jars high then start to throw them to the ground.

2

Rope at ankle level,
a walkway sprinkled with water
under red and orange maples along a white plastered wall;

moss covering the irregular ground
under propped up weeping cherry trees;

in a corral
a woman is about to whisper and pat the roan’s neck;

an amber chasm inside a cello;

in a business conversation,
the Silences are eel farms Passed on a bullet train;

a silence in the shape of a rake;

a sheet of ice floating along a dock;
the texture of icy black basil leaves at sunrise;

a Shaggy Mane pushing up through asphalt;

a woman wearing a multicolored dress of silk screened 
   naked women
ahout to peel an egg;

three stones leading into a pond.