And suddenly we were in it or suddenly we realized language, the day within the mind within the world except for the parts going unabsorbed and inexcusable as two of us walk in black hands clasped behind our backs, church courtyard, Sunday, looking at old-fashioned names engraved. You were my Rose. You were my Lilly, my Loralie, my Cora, my Clara, and it was snow. A flash goes off radiating out the granite angel, heavy and plinth. And in the mind’s eye make the snow melt, real-time sped up, imagination revealing crocus buds blooming out the sodden earth as strain fills the air, there, where television announcements radiate through open windows on this inordinately warm day. More bombs shake. Flesh in liquid, skin in shreds. Air quakes in power,

thought admitting hemispheric faults, different-falling into the redbud from behind flares going out. Going out as in sea or waiting for a new uttering in the glare, shadow, beam to ask the question, form the adamant. What was meant in the window, crisp sounds of occlusion, elements held in glass vials while oxygen rains down. Lush’s been wicked, sinned when dreads end lovingly: a reconsideration in the wake of mountain light. Water drips shining, hopeful drops

counting the measure of what is left after the walk, acquaintance, branches glossing and tremmoring in wind and traffic—twenty-first century cars too large for twentieth century streets, demure limits sand lit wars know. Gone by, lands-thundering acquaintance with the river unfolding and it was the humid South that he heard in the birds of memory, whims met while handed love slows the general state of worry to less than an insipid storm. Linen-wound to inner beds, the world ignored of the redbud trees and petrol of a February afternoon, film over-running my eyes, I conclude that indeed there is no second life. And what you wish I promised I’d reveal are mere aches in flower. Death

a state of light gone interior rendering me vantage; blossom; floral; rendering me up in rafters and twisted, twisting the fall through the dust pelvic blossom ground

breaking like history flung into the glass orb of world and heralded like the lamp globe broken, shattering out a brighter luster than when frosted, glassed. The moments between moments constitute wanting. Shatter. Speaking, the slivering lines form the redbud trees in the distance and the flames against cloud and quickness limit; wed; as in a piecing together, gluey fingers, particles kept outside of the envisioned shape of the object, a still substance-force splintering in a blaze of eye-pattern, residue of the done before. Unendingly reword, the small animal with its heart still beating

stares into you, eyes mirrored to take over darkness, to win it, our conversion candid below, folding, unfolding, end slaking to drown near the rocks. And on the interstate, not here but in the South between Baton Rouge and Jackson, little white gloves lie scattered along the greenbelt one moment before me, one moment with me, then fading in the side view mirror. Land burns. I find, then compensate missed revolution—here it had been all television and redbuds and imagined crocuses grown up quickly, in less than a minute then rewound, for my pleasure, back into the ground. As surely as there had been a little town scolding, a moment cajoling, a little bone shaking around in its box, we ask for relinquishment in the middle of the universe, starry florets. Stand firm, my mind, and concentrate on the silence imagined outside of thinking, the space beyond the head quiet-seeming after the babble of thought and traffic and the radio and the red stained glass shadowing snow with bare sad hymns, a brittle down