You'll show that toad-eater who wrote Night Thoughts
what's happened in two centuries or so.
You'll make your yard the spirit's doorway1
to metamorphs and comet-lit inventions.
Go ahead， walk the cathedral-volumned night.
Let Perseids stripe your eyes.
I read the other day
that giant black snowballs from outer space
created our oceans.
Center me， physics， keep me
from brooding too long on my fear，
on the pickup2 truck that rammed3 the school bus，
on the strange sea pastures of the Persian Gulf4，
on love and its string of losses.
Now everything's strings5， they say， cosplaymic strings
that pull the galaxies6 toward the Great Attractor
holding all matter together.
Microcosplaym， meet macrocosplaym.
Solace7 us with your kinship， make
one little yard an everywhere.
I think of Calvino's
dark， humorous mind，
another squirrel in the treeTOPs
how he made truth and wit
from troubling loops of knowledge.
And Miroslav Holub，
who lived alone in this house one spring
and pondered this yard as I do.
The appetite for fact
helped him survive， walk around
and laugh to himself， inside
this century's bluntest terrors
the one that Hitler made，
the one that Stalin added.
A string may link me to them here，
and run
right through the blackened school bus，
the rubble8 of Beirut，
down to the toxic9 wastes， on up and out
to the ice ball punching our atmosphere
Like Theseus in his labyrinth10，
I stand here holding
my little end of string.
I caught and cupped a firefly just now
like an old miser11 blowing on his palms
to keep some warmth in.
I'd like that glow to be
The milky12 streams of star-mess overhead，
the rivulets13 of words below，
nacreous teeth of the speaker in the dark
words folding into the spiral that runs up
to the coiled shape of galaxies
as the brain whorls match the labyrinthine14 curves，
echoing stairwell， spinning DNA15，
the play with nests and shrinking models，
the sidewise slide， the folding-up of sense，
the web the spider swings and spins， connecting.
Is this a dream？I see my grandpa milking，
I watch my mother watching him.
The cats swarm16 round， the barn is cold，
the cows chew steadily17 and stamp
in random18 patterns， defecate
in flops19 and splatters， steaming heaps.
I'm the froth of the milk， the silvery pail，
the piles of hay， the cats
spiraling round my legs.
I am the frost-coated lightning rod.
We play with infinity20， this is our luck，
measureless measuring， lot lines and boundaries
always deferred21， always potential，
doing， undoing22， doing， undoing，
we repeat ourselves so infinity
can make love to finity， kiss it，
dance with it all night.
I taste the water from that old farm's well.
The milk was warm. The water's hard and sweet.
Repetition's magic. I knew it in my bones.
Let me repeat my dream for you，
let me repeat it for myself.
Let me talk on in this starlight，
these meteor streakings of nonsense，
this chaos23， these fractals and freckles24.
Don't take my words away from me yet.
I'm doing my midnight weeding，
grasping the thistles close to the root，
I'm losing the dream farm， I'm
probably failing， repeating
what others have said
but that farm， like an old brown photograph
suddenly filling the senses
and this night， like a silver gelatin print
and a string that runs from me to the past：
the view from the farmhouse25 window
across the silent fields of snow.