I turned forty the year I wrote it
  all down, every bit
  I could remember:

Sluice me, stop my breath—still my 
  life to this, my fist 
taut, a hand of fingers feeds my 

Karen made a poem
walking to rehearsal
about children making angels

Several people from Chelsea, seminarians and clergy,

in the wand of the Oxford Movement transported to America,
made their way out to the Territory, out to Wisconsin,

There is so much lonliness in that gold.
The moon of every night is not the moon
That the first Adam saw.

I might have been a martyr. Instead I was
A scourge of martyrs, trying souls in fire.
To save my own soul, I tried tears and prayer,

The story is always the same story,
With every step retraced;
They tell the story in Buenos Aires

Thousands upon thousands of grains of sand,
Rivers that know no rest, the sparkling white
Snowflake more delicate than a shadow, light

   Through the peephole he could see a boy
Playing patience on the huge crimson sofa.
    There was the turkey, the second-best

I am writing from a place you have never been,
Where the trains don’t run, and planes
Don’t land, a place to the west,