To each his own urgency. I’ve spent this morning clearing 

best as I can the strange pornography that last night’s

storms made of the trees in the yard: oak and pear branches

everywhere; of the saplings, one broken, the other in need

of re-tying—its roots meanwhile, where the topsoil’s gotten

washed away, left exposed to a spring that, not yet done settling

in, can’t be trusted. I like a wreckage I can manage myself,

the chance it offers for that particular version of power

that comes from winnowing cleanly the lost from the still

salvageable, not erasing disorder exactly, but returning

order to a fair footing, at least, beside a wilderness I wouldn’t 

live without. I’ve got this friend—I guess you could call him that—

who worries I’ll never stop courting recklessness—his 

word for it—as a way of compensating for or maybe making

room, where there should 

                                                  be no room, for something torn

inside. Who can say if that’s right? After a life of no signs 

of it, he’s found faith, and wants to know if I’m ready, finally, 

to—as, again, he puts it—put my hand in the Lord’s. For

the ancient Greeks—though others, too, must have thought this—

the gods were compelled most by rhythm, that’s why ritual 

was so important, the patterning of it, rhythm’s lost 

without pattern. I don’t doubt that the gods—if that’s

what you want to call whatever happens in this world, or

doesn’t, or not as you hoped, or hoped for once it wouldn’t—

seem as likely as any of us to be distracted by rhythm into

turning from one thing toward something else, but if what

comes in return is the gods’ briefly full attention, though

magisterial at first, maybe—well, good luck dealing 

with that. As when 

                                      intimacy seems nothing more, anymore, than 

a form of letting what’s been simple enough become difficult, 

because now less far. Or as when, looking into a mirror, 

I’ve looked closer still, and seen the rest that I’d missed earlier: 

fierce regret, with its flames for fingers, hope as the not-so-

dark holdover from the dark before… Despite our differences, 

we agree about most things, my friend and I, or let’s say it 

gets harder for me, as the years go by, to know for sure

he’s wrong… It’s like a game between us. He says my 

moods are like the images any burst of starlings makes 

against an open sky, before flying away.   say either no one’s 

listening, this late, or else anyone is. You’ve changed, he says,

getting slowly dressed again. You don’t know me, I say, I say back.