TO BE ASCETIC (1-4)

the orchard (1)

Go on with the shadow
of one underneath
a canopy / between rows of oranges
upon rows of mulberries
of white fig and / unripe persimmons.



Who are these people
anointing each other w/ plums
and halved grapes / pineapples
pears and lemon wedges
/ loquats?

And beetles eating and ants
who wield their white eggs
to and fore, a long time,

wrens that come to
regard each other / by the way


the pigeon (2)

Go on out and eat
something in the night.

Black garage of night, go on

with the shadow of remainders
and sour blossoms, the flesh shaken
out of an orange / some beetles
in the hairs of a little
nest that falls

a trap door (3)

The way something shaved feels
like a dog or the back
of a boy’s head / a piece of light
slides down the fence
and away


the mountains & the evening
that has fallen on

a persimmon (4)

before it goes white& flinty
and is lettering the daffodils
and is / drawn on

Bur-chervil & Dogbane thinning
and falling to dusk

Go on with the shadows that run
it through the trees and up the trees
by way of some system, and (out of) asking
look, there

the persimmon tips the edges of

a hand of leaves /
and small white bells

then plumbed from

Putting on a path btw houses / go
on with the shadows that skim shifts
of grass, the grass in heaps, and mists’ rising
crown clearing at newly dark

the hand (5)

on the back of a spider bolting,
on cicadas or locusts or the backs
of moths glimmering, a scoop of gnats
in the shower at dusk , a separation of feet
from the sound they make on the roof:

the May beetle, June beetle

The hand the foliage had
in sneakings out.

Which ever way we met
in the green lawn
on the soft of our backs
and lay there

itching awn and spikelets
, making out of the grass
some stars

a mountain(6)

With this face to us, like a blunt cusp
in the yellow grass. Pale and hard at night.
In the angled grass, the night,
spitting in your hair.

That is this yellow field, the wolves to the moths
that are this / field of the face
in each darkness, of the sky in a crevice

that is cracked wheat, and jutting-up
roots, an orange on the back
arching over /