I swear to you she wanted back into the shut, the slow,

a ground onto which to say This is my actual life, Good Morning,
onto which to say That girl on her knees who is me
is still digging that square yard of land up
to catalogue and press onto the page all she could find in it
and name, somewhere late April, where they believe in ideas,
Thursday, a little of what persists and all the rest.

Before that, dreams. The dream of being warm
and staying warm. The dream of the upper hand like a love song,
the dream of the right weapon and then the perfect escape.

Then the dream of the song of having business here.

Then the dream of you two sitting on the couch, of the mood
of armies (hand of God), of the city burning in the distance.

The dream of before and after (are we getting closer?) the dream
of finally after days…

(Miss_________ lets out a shattering scream.)

I swear to you this begins with that girl on a day after sudden rain
and then out of nowhere sun (as if to expose what of the hills—
the white glare of x, the scathing splendor of y,
the wailing interminable________? that girl having run
down from the house and up over the fence not like an animal
but like a thinking, link by link, and over

into the allotted earth—for Science Fair—into the everything of
one square yard of earth. Here it begins
to slip. She took the spade and drew the lines. Right through
the weedbeds, lichen, moss, keeping the halve of things that landed in
by chance, new leaves, riffraff the wind blew in—

Here is the smell of earth being cut, the smell of the four lines.
Here is the brownsweet of the abstract where her four small furrows
say the one word over.
She will take the ruler and push it down till it’s all the way in.
She will slide its razor-edge along through colonies, tunnels,
through powdered rock and powdered leaf,

and everything on its way to the one right destination
like a cloak coming off, shoulders rising,
(after one has abandoned the idea of x;
after one has accorded to the reader the y)—
her hole in the loam like a saying in the midst of the field of patience,
fattening the air above it with detail,
an embellishment on the April air,
the rendezvous of hands and earth—

Say we leave her there, squatting down, haunches up,
pulling the weeds up with tweezers,
pulling the thriving apart into the true,
each seedpod each worm on the way down retrieved into a 
plastic bag (shall I compare thee), Say we,

leave her there, where else is there to go? A word,
a mouth over water? Is there somewhere
neither there nor here?
Where do we continue living now, in what terrain?
Mud, ash, _______, _______. We want it to stick to us,
hands not full but not clean. What is wide-meshed enough
yet lets nothing through, the bunch of ribbon,
her hair tied up that the wind be seen?

If, for instance, this was the place instead,

where the gods fought the giants and monsters
(us the ideal countryside, flesh, interpretation),
if, for instance, this were not a chosen place but a place
blundered into, a place which is a meadow with a hole in it,

and some crawl through such a hole to the other place

and some use it to count with and buy with

and some hide in it and see Him go by

and to some it is the hole on the back of the man running

through which what’s coming towards him is coming into him, growing larger,

a hole in his chest through which the trees in the distance are seen
growing larger shoving out sky shoving out storyline

until it’s close it’s all you can see this moment this hole in his back

in which now a girl with a weed and a notebook appears.