Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness —

to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled nature.
But if we’re to become part of it all,
won’t our paradise also involve

participation in being, say,
diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks
on August pavement,
weird glow of service areas

along the interstate at night?
We’ll be shiny pink egg cartons,
and the thick treads of burst tires
along the highways in Pennsylvania:

a hell we’ve made to accompany
the given: we will join
our tiresome productions,
things that want to be useless forever.

But that’s me talking. Helen
would take the greatest pleasure
in being a scrap of paper,
if that’s what there were to experience.

Perhaps that’s why she’s a painter,
finally: to practice disappearing
into her scrupulous attention,
an exacting rehearsal for the larger

world of things it won’t be easy to love.
Helen I think will master it, though I may not.
She has practiced a long time learning to see.
I have devoted myself to affirmation,

when I should have kept my eyes on the ground

Blackboard covered with a dust
 of living chalk, live chaos-cloud
  wormed by turbulence: the rod glides

and the vet narrates shadows
 I can’t quite force into shape:
  His kidneys might . . . the spleen appears . . .

I can’t see what he sees, and so
 resort to simile: cloudbank, galaxy
  blurred with slow comings

and goings, that far away. The doctor
 makes appreciative noises,
  to encourage me;

he praises Beau’s stillness.
 I stroke the slope beneath
  those open, abstracted eyes,

patient, willing to endure whatever
 we deem necessary, while the vet
  runs along the shaved blonde

Today I’m herding the two old dogs
 into the back of the car,
  after the early walk, wet woods:

Beau’s generous attention must be
 brought into focus, gaze pointed
  to the tailgate so he’ll be ready to leap,

and Arden, arthritic in his hind legs,
 needs me to lift first his forepaws
  and then, placing my hands

under his haunches, hoist the moist
 black bulk of him into the wagon,
  and he growls a little

before he turns to face me,
 glad to have been lifted—
  And as I go to praise them,

as I like to do, the words
 that come from my mouth,
  from nowhere, are Time’s children,

as though that were the dearest thing
 a person could say.
  Why did I call them by that name?

They race this quick parabola
 faster than we do, as though
  it were a run in the best of woods,

run in their dreams, paws twitching
 —even asleep they’re hurrying.
  Doesn’t the world go fast enough?

We’re caught in this morning’s
 last-of-April rain, the three of us
  bound and fired by duration

—rhythm too swift for even them
 to hear, though perhaps we catch
 a little of that rush and ardor

—furious poetry!—
 the sound time makes,
  seeing us through.

Big blocks of ice
—clear cornerstones—
chug down a turning belt
toward the blades of a wicked,

spinning fan; scraping din
of a thousand skates and then
powder flies out in a roaring
firehose spray of diamond dust,

and the film crew obscures
the well-used Manhattan snow
with a replica of snow.

Trailers along the edge of the Square,
arc lamps, the tangled cables
of a technical art, and our park’s

a version of itself. We walk here
daily, the old dogs and I glad
for the open rectangle of air

held in its frame of towers,
their heads held still and high
to catch the dog run’s rich,

acidic atmosphere, whitened faces
—theirs and mine—lifted toward gray
branches veining the variable sky.

Today we’re stopped at the rim:
one guy’s assigned the task
of protecting the pristine field

a woman will traverse
—after countless details are worried
into place—at a careful angle,

headed toward West Fourth.
They’re filming The Hours,
Michael’s novel, a sort of refraction

of Mrs. Dalloway. Both books
transpire on a single June day;
that’s the verb; these books do

breathe an air all attention,
as if their substance were a gaze
entirely open to experience, eager

to know—They believe
the deepest pleasure is seeing
and saying how we see,

even when we’re floored
by spring’s sharp grief, or a steady
approaching wave of darkness.

In the movie version, it’s winter;
they’re aiming for a holiday release,
and so must hasten onward.

Someone calls out Background!
and hired New Yorkers begin
to pass behind the perfect field,

a bit self-conscious, skaters
and shoppers too slow to convince,
so they try it again, Clarissa passing

the sandblasted arch
bound in its ring of chain-link,
monument glowing gray against the gray

A little less now in the world to love.

Taxi on Bleecker, dim afternoon, after
a bright one’s passing, after the hours
in stations and trains, blur of the meadows

through dull windows, fitful sleep,
heading home, and now the darkness inside
the cab deeper than anything a winter afternoon

could tender. Nothing stays, the self
has no power over time, we’re stuck
in a clot of traffic, then this: a florist shop,

where something else stood yesterday,
what was it? Do things give way that fast?
PARADISE FLOWERS, arced in gold

on the window glass, racks and rows
of blooms, and an odd openness on the sidewalk,
and—look, the telltale script of cables

inking the street, trailers near, and Martian lamps,
and a lone figure in a khaki coat poised
with a clutch of blooms while they check her aspect

through the lens: Clarissa, of course,
buying the flowers herself.
I take it personally. As if,

no matter what, this emblem persists:
a woman went to buy flowers, years ago,
in a novel, and was entered

by the world. Then in another novel,
her double chose blooms of her own
while the blessed indifferent life

of the street pierced her, and now
here she is, blazing in a dim trench
of February, the present an image

reduced through a lens, a smaller version
of a room in which love resided.
Though they continue, shadow and replica,

copy and replay, adapted, reduced,
reframed: beautiful versions—a paper cone of asters,
golden dog nipping at a glove—fleeting,

and no more false than they are true.

Your old kitchen, dear, on Bleecker: sugar, dates, black tea.
Your house, then ours. Anyone’s now. Memory’s furious land.

Mrs. Ajo planted these:
single, utterly durable, red.
Mr. Ajo used to walk up the street
from the bay with a bucket of clams

and a cigarette fixed in his mouth
as though he’d been born
with these accessories.
They’re gone now.

The poppies, in June, forthright,
like a single stripe of the flag,
all along one side of their closed-up
house: insistent, unqualified color,

and a hundred furred green
buds lift, on their bowed necks,
preparing a further outcry.
When I say I hate time, Paul says

how else could we find depth
of character, or grow souls?
Of course he’s right,
but I can’t help thinking

the Ajos wouldn’t vote
for the mottled, complexified
shades favored by the years;
they liked this intransigent red,

they wanted it plain
and dependable, noisy.
Even Mr. Ajo, who once looked
at my garden in full bloom,

all old roses and peonies,
and said, talking around his cigarette,
Lot of money in that