For Maxine Kuhn

Part may be more than whole, least may be best.
                                               —Robert Francis

Earth, is it not just this that you want: to arise invisibly in us?
Is not your dream to be one day invisible? Earth! invisible!
                       From “Duino Elegy #9 by Rainer Maria Rilke

I made a list for each day,
which was enough, since I was inclined
to do too much in a single day—
more than a dozen men sometimes
in a couple of days, so drawn to work
and blessed with strength I couldn’t imagine
paradise without it, much less remember
the bliss that idlers canonized
as myth more real than the history of days.
“Fix the bridge, weed the beans,
till the corn, plant some chard,”
I wrote in the box on my birthday,
which in the rule of night became
an order for that day, like all
the other days that authorized
my sleep to grant me another
day as long as I saw the ruse
of difference between each thing,
then woke with the charge of putting my mind
to the dream, which was my work
in the garden, the plot that needed me
and not the other in rows of text
that merely bloomed. To be the genius
of my own patch with only so
many days to plant, grow,
and reap. So, I gathered my tools at dawn
and headed down to the field and jacked
the bridge that had fallen in the rains.
Placed a stone the ground had made
a million years ago for this
repair beneath the beam that had lost
its hold on the opposite bank. Weeded
the beans until it was time to rest,
then sat for a while in the shade of a willow
beside the stream. Thought about nothing
until it was something as part of the whole
that was also whole for being connected
to the most unlikely things: ant,
pokeweed, mullein, worm…Stuck
my head in the stream like a lure for the big one
that always gets away. Walked
back to the garden to till the corn
only to find the corpse of a mouse
inside the case that houses the machine.
Back up then to fetch the ratchet
and a little shroud to bury her in—
slower this time than before
and grievous now—one dead at least
and maybe more from catching against
the screen when I pulled the cord and it
pulled back. “Poor mousie,” I cried 
like Burns. I should have guessed some creature
was there after finding a snake last year
would round and round the sprocket
like another cord. So many dead
inside the tiller. So much work
recovering the bodies. House, housing,
mouse, bridge, fountain, snake, 
I thought like the sky whose clouds
erase its blues so perfectly.
Like the dirt that smells of the hole
and everything in it, words were all;
they came to like birds to a tree
and I wrote them down for nothing
with a trowel for the stars to scan as nothing
also—so much nothing at the end
of the day I called it darling, darling.