PHOTOGRAPHS FROM RT. 80

1.
Here, the fields in rough January light, a barn,
a line of trees. Distance, a blue horizon, the
absence of particulars. In the abandoned barn
the old boards alternate with nothing, with ether:
wood, light, wood, the whole thing glowing
in the iridescent field, this constant movement and our silence,
having been close to the unspeakable: illness, family,
the suffocating sadness of your hometown at night.
The sun moves against the edges of the world, what we know,
what we do not know. I am thinking
about what God wants, about the idea of God wanting.
The trees, chosen to grow here, in this line,
are intricate, and full of intent.

2.
In the wide frame of our windshield
at least three kinds of weather:
to our right chiaroscuro, the dark clouds
light-tinged. On the left a flat plane of pale blue.
Miles ahead of us, east, a column of rain
gray and singular, beneath
the cover of cumulous.

The aperture dilates its fraction
of time, consumes its given
quantity of light, and days later
from this cardboard box, this human
machine: weather and world, even the feeling
of driving all afternoon through miles
of winter-laden fields, your landscape,
your wordless ground, Iowa.

CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

When I met you, I turned you over and over in my head,
trying to know what you meant.

Once, looking at you, a word
wrote itself on my mind.

The sense we make of things
(space, time, causation)
is, according to Kant,
a function of the mind’s ordering impulse,
rather than a function of the world.

What is this? I said. You said, I’ll tell you what
it isn’t.

Kant’s early work deals exclusively
with hurricanes and winds.

Your talk is like religion.
It means everything and nothing.

Act without regard to any end, Kant instructs.
Act as if the maxim of your action
were to become through your will a general law.

The maxims of your actions were terrifying.

You told me you had sex for the first time when you were five.

That’s not sex, I said.

It felt like sex.

Silence.  Wind lifting the leaves outside.

Central to The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s belief
in the unknowableness of things in themselves.

The word was: pain.

I am painting you a picture, you said.

HOUSEWORK

The years have cleared now and left you here,
two flights above the street, in a square room
you sweep every afternoon, amazed, always,
at the tenacity of dust. Life is, mostly,
a series of imagined imperatives:
the law of sleeping and the law of snow;
cleaning, each morning, the plates,
the clothes from the floor,
whatever the huge tide has left behind.
It is, none of it, necessary:
not the stacks of dishes in the cupboard,
not the newspaper,
not the elaborate occasion of your coffee.
All this (even love, the great wave of it
rising now, above your life) is made. Start
by emptying.

DIRECTIVE (WHAT IS POETRY?)

In the circular side-mirror of a passing truck you see it whole:
the sky and what the sky contains—
           leaves, and the bodies of birds—
(these, in a gesture you call arabesque, perform a pantomime of one).
There is also a horizon in the picture.
Below it,
the road recedes to a single point.

Ahead of you the actual sky
becomes a nameless color. It is difficult
to look at.

Make the birds a figure for thought—
            The circling upwards, the form of idea,
the mind circling, the mind pushing up against the sky—

Say something here about the light.

Turn the car around.  In your dark house,
reread the letters you have placed in impossible envelopes.
Let a equal not a.