The wild cherries ripen, black and fat,
Paradisal fruits that taste of no man’s sweat.

Reach up, pull down the laden branch, and eat;
When you have learned their bitterness, they taste sweet.

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar. God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

Now, far from women’s arms
and memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness. Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Beware of the man who praises liberated women;
he is planning to quit his job.

Now we must get up quickly,
dress ourselves, and run away.
Because it surrounds us, because
they are coming with wolves on leashes,
because I stood just now at the window
and saw the wall of hills on fire.
They have taken our parents away.
Downstairs in the half dark, two strangers
move about, lighting the stove.

Waiting for the object,
the abject adjunct—

the loss of feel here,
field, faded.

Singing inside,
outside grey, wet,

cold out. The weather
doesn’t know it,

goes only on to
wherever.

Knowing what
knowing is,

think less
of your life as labor.

Pain’s increase,
thought’s random torture,

grow with intent.
Simply live.

The sky’s like a pewter
of curiously dulled blue,
and “My heart’s in the highlands . . .,”
feels the day beginning again.

And whatever, whatever, says it
again, and stays here, stays
here with its old hands,
holds on with its stiff, old fingers,

can come too, like they say,
can come with me into this patient weather,
and won’t be left alone, no, never alone ever
again,
in whatever time’s left for us here.

When I was a kid, I
thought like a kid —

I was a kid,
you dig it. But

a hundred and fifty years later,
that’s a whole long time to

wait for the train.