Today, my love, leaves are thrashing the wind just as pedestrians are erecting again the buildings of this drab forbidding city, and our lives, as I lose track of them, are the lives of others derailing in time and getting things done. Impossible to make sense of any one face or mouth, though each distance is clear, and you are miles from here. Let your pure space crowd my heart, that we might stay awhile longer amid the flying debris. This moment, I swear it, isn't going anywhere

Because it all just breaks apart, and the pieces scatter and rearrange without much fanfare or notice.

Because you can¡¯t and don¡¯t remember the step that kicked up dust and left this planet¡ªyou¡¯d give up even more now.

Because the body itself¡ªthe heart¡¯s

not dead but deeper, wrapped up in curtains, a different color, among the railings and the pigeons, the rooftops and walls¡ª

for all you know it¡¯s a question of bread

or beer.

Because even love

returns. The city¡¯s all brightness

and shadow, deckle-edged, bluer than air¡ªthere's no help anywhere¡ªyou no longer know how to listen.

And love says, love¡ªmidnight to midnight,

already ablaze. And the boulevard¡ªwide-open. And the well- stocked crowdless market, and a lone taxi blears.

Even happiness¡ªthe way anger¡¯s come back to roost again. And joy, though joy¡¯s not in the ear or the eye. On this walk.

The gulls hover offshore and the islands are speckled with fire.

Even love, even because.

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth and go on out over the sea marshes and the brant in bays and over the hills of tall hickory and over the crater lakes and canyons and on up through the spheres of diminishing air past the blackset noctilucent clouds where one wants to stop and look way past all the light diffusions and bombardments up farther than the loss of sight into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest coelenterates and praying for a nerve cell with all the soul of my chemical reactions and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down and if I find you I must go out deep into your far resolutions and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves