ALT 57 For you I’d do the whole thing through below, above for now, for love.

ALT After feints the heart steadies, pointwise invariant, by the drown'd light of her fire. In the set course we pass layer after layer, loving what we still know. It is an estranged passion, but true, the daughter willed back by blue eyes, unscathed, down the central pain pathway. Timelike delirium cools at this crossing, with your head in my arms. The ship steadies and the bird also; from frenzy to darker fields we go.

ALT Standing by the window I heard it, while waiting for the turn. In hot light and chill air it was the crossing flow of even life, hurt in the mouth but exhausted with passion and joy. Free to leave at either side, at the fold line found in threats like herbage, the watch is fearful and promised before. The years jostle and burn up as a trust plasma. Beyond help it is joy at death itself: a toy hard to bear, laughing all night.

ALT Which makes the thinning sorrow of flight the last disjunction, of the heart: that news is the person, and love the shape of his compulsion in the musical phrase, nearly but not yet back, into the remotest past. Of which the heart is capable and will journey over any desert and through the air, making the turn and stop undreamed of: love is, always, the flight back to where we are.

ALT UNDER THE RIVER Under the river of the world, the world. And beneath that palace, a palace—just the same. From the quarry ledge, children dive over and over into blue sky: it always greets them the same, laughter, then towels, and going home with watery ears. It sings to them then for hours, hushing the rest— family, dinnerware, tires spinning by, all stilled. Open-winged for those moments between world and world, the rooms leading one to the next, each linoleum floor marble-cool, the ceilings stencilled with water lilies, stars.