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Surely the heavens don’t play favorites? No,
of course not, yet there is a hue that can be heard
when what is meets what might be and the color

of cherish develops in the center of the sky

canto 20

my mother called
and said, Come. Come
over now, to see your
father,
who,
when I came, rushing,
with Lucy
behind me
with her little hands
turning like wind catchers
in a light breeze,
into the house, where he sat
at the couch with a book
and said, Aha, see,
and he read from the book
every third word he saw
because that was what he could see.

my father began to see in threes,
sentences, and the complexity
of feeling, in threes, reading,
but wholes, remembering.

He read me this:
patients craniectomy compared.
See, he said, soon he said,
they’ll all be back. His face
like a lamp there on the couch,
Lucy, saying, It’s amazing,
my mother with a few tears
on her cheek.
I said, In threes. What does it mean?

Wholes excised into threes:
God’s number, he said,
and she agreed, and she agreed.
Who’s meaning is completeness.
But also, he said, some aspect
of recovery’s secret, motioned
by divine motions, triptychs,
triples, triads, triumvirates,
and troikas,
a corner, an approach, a rope
in succession or ordering
(I thought about the corner,
a person getting closer,
the image of the rope. He said:
I thought, yes, we may make passage
this way)
trinity in the end.

he’ll pray like Christ
did on his day of reckoning,
my mother said,
and when things calmed,
dinner over,
I asked my father:
but why divine, why
not some measure
only of the brain’s efficiency,
as threes are manageable
more than fours or sevens?

my mother motioned
the tines of a fork my way,
which come in fours,
saying: don’t ruin it,
don’t ruin it, the way
you always do.

my father reading, said,
from the sonnets:
Three . . .
Have . . . forests shook . . . pride,
. . . springs
and gave me remonstration
from his ellipses suffering
brain. I gave him my palms,
which then meant peace,
and I smiled because
that night I knew sleep
would be easier.

but before sleep Lucy
stood at the door to my room
soon for her place on the couch.
She said: why can’t you just let
him have some hope, her some hope.
I can, I said. He can have it.
But there are disappointments
and there are tenderer ones.
The rope holding a climber
can break. He says, as he falls,
that’s disappointing.

canto 18

yes, my father, larger
than life told me
deepsleeping stories,
how the young and the old,
the hairless and bearded,
the thin and the large,
would leave their beds
with images of sleep
in their eyes and in their hands
and in their pockets
and in their bags
and in their stomachs.

the birds would sing.
The stars would blow
golden winds to clutter the heavens
and curtain its widths
across and distort
the blacknesses of time.
The horses with horns
from their foreheads, stomping.
The warm stone tops
in which meditators
reluctantly stood
and walked out.

he said:
I saw absolutely nothing
but with little effort, seated
at his desk with his hands
on the uneven topology of this strange
truth, but giving
some amount of extra breath
to the word nothing
so that absolute
played the roll
of a rising surface,
though not of too much length,
at the edge of which, the word
nothing
dropped a small distance
to rest on the ether of meaning
like a great black whale
grown still and waiting
at some oceanic crossroads.

but I don’t know why
it should or shouldn’t matter
but I hear the urgency,
the urgency of your question,
and so I respond,
merely respond
with the truth.
But I do have my own
question, he said:
what does the nothing mean?
What should I do with it?
It’s like a rock in my head.

but I do remember
once seeing, yes, a cross
shape floating over the grass,
some unlikely insect
whose wings I could not see,
this floating insect
crossing my vision,
wingless but winged
and thin as spider legs,
an insect you’d think
would be crushed
by even the lightest breeze,
and I remember wondering:
how can such a thing be living?

outside his office,
I pressed my back
against the wall,
felt the wall
at the back of my head,
feeling my father
at his desk
like a great dark
whale waiting,
like a great cave
wondering at the silence
of absences,
the ponderousness of nothing.

my mother
I saw
clacking the plates
in the washer,
taking a towel
to the wetter ones,
looked at me
through the door to the kitchen
and said:
I’m still waiting
for the edge of the plateau.
I’m still waiting
for him to wake up.

canto 14

one day
things and places
turned unfamiliar.

my apartment,
the woman I watched
from the balcony
who lived next door,
(taller, she seemed,
and when she raised
a coffee to me
in that peach-colored
tulip, she winked),
the little bottles,
the packages,
the implements
in the bathroom cabinet,
the cans,
bags, and boxes
on the kitchen shelves,
which I shook,
wondering about the rattles,
the globs and mashing
therein, wherein what?
I wondering,
wandering over rugs
that had become
strange languages,
I wondering,
pausing at faces staring
back at me with the blackness
of spiders’ eyes.

and the phones,
and the windows,
and the paintings,
and the notes
I’d written as reminders
of tomorrow’s words and colors
and conversations,
all unanticipatable now.
Such as, Call Mom,
and say what?

Henry called
and said, Let’s go
to the meadow
and walk there
through the flowers
and the bees.
I asked him: what meadow?
We live in the midst
of buildings. We live
above and surrounded
by baking stone,
birds that look
like crippled hands,
and other animals
whose casts of face
and casts of tail
suggest attack
by cornered creatures,
creatures lost, creatures afraid.
And in the sky
soon will come aliens
after us or meteors
hot with speed
and hot with memories
of thoughtless vectors
to pummel our inventions
and our skulls.

the one outside the city,
he said into the phone.
I said, Oh that one,
remembering that outside
of the city there were indeed,
indeed there were meadows
and mountains and other bird
forms, and I remembered
that even in the city,
there were indeed trees
and flowers and dogs
whose eyes threw feathers
at you and stopped
to watch and wonder
with wrinkled foreheads
how tall the buildings
could be, how wide the river
that turned under bridges
could be, how the sky,
birds, clouds, and oft-passing
passenger planes burned
against the silver windows,
and the wind would blow
and the smoke would clear
. . . sometimes.