the distance look bluer they hover in the hospitable air
& the angels of I-Thought-It-Would-Be-Otherwise & I-
Never-Thought-At-All have affixed the small countries

of their wings—though neither knows a feather from a flame
—so that trees move aside & the wind blows too fast past
the bolted windows (you cannot be your own regret) listen:

we invent things when facts are insufficient we weave
the beginning on the loom of everything pick up those
branches that the wind took down & the moon's full-up

with exit wounds & inertia (of quiescence & a structure
reminiscent of turbulent equations) all hours are not equal
in this that we find is neither one thing nor another when

the message leaves the body we do this to live I'm telling
only you the world's ablaze with foreboding & all that
is at rest (yes) still gesture's a part of our mistakable say

Consider this World in All Its Blue Extremities

Less than the Plow

Your life is less, than the plow than the whitening world
(now snow like a hail of heavens white against the dark trees
dark against the white sky -- and whatever falls here fades).

He thinks you are a bottle filled with blue milk he thinks
you must come the way music must come from the body
and enter again. Like your fretless throat. (The persuasion

of sorrow.) (A conflation of bodies.) Like laurel right down
to the water. (You are counting up the enemy.) (The number
is high.) You must pity what falls and cannot find its wings.