Forest Service Road on 6 didn’t come up.

You and I quiet, grown up together,

no questions to ask each other. We turned

on what we thought might work, a brown dirt wick

to the trees. I thought of the Cascade Trail,

her sweet bebop a backdrop to floating white silos

out the window, hoodoo ghosts on the Osceola stop.

Past the old car graveyard, then an orchard, dirt road/

black cow/black cow/how do we get around?

So much country, how do we even know where to go?

Translated from the Czech by Deborah Garfinkle

By the tracks, a dog

climbs into the rabbit’s skin. Frost

lifts the countryside with the chain pump’s

snapping, the countryside

O maker of paper and dams

formed after minerals of time,

teach me to adjust to this bed,

varved histories and sensitivities.

If we pull together, there’s harmony.

If alone, I breathe in. Pull a deep draft of liquor.

After-supper lure to bother with window blinds—

a string is all that’s needed for privacy for lovers, but do

You want to write. You want to write.

Tonight a sharp breeze from the river

or elsewhere. The trains run later

than expected, column of low whistle parting

clouds, and this new place is on a flight path

The cup

in your hand

that looks like a hand

feels to your fingers

just like a cup

Plot me: (x,0) (0,x) on the body

the body pumping: blood type O (one hopes) the body

processing: O (element)

Well-worn sea-eyed, that was the year of the Ox,

the year of the unknown (x), the placeholder (0)

strands of x’s and o’s placed in the impossible soft of your palms

I.

Descending frost to freshet, vernal-laved

deluging—Had we empty hands we’d shred

delphiniums and let the petals (frayed,

depleted), hard perfume the waterbed,

turn

There is nothing to be said about it.

Streamed wind and waterspray duetting hard

against the house. These days are clipped

from someone’s fowler’s snare—that is,

with cruel abandon, rags and bones (no heart).

ruby-throated, this

morning’s hummingbird

trembling at the yellow

voices beyond the wall,

Spanish, probably, the cast

of morning shadows, Friday,