--- R A N D A L L   C O U C H

 
                         But what if God have seen, and Death ensue?
                                      —Paradise Lost IX, 826 
 
 
I knew I'd leave Broocke
when he said If you got sick,
you'd take me down with you.
We could lose everything. 

Two paths begin
so close together,
doomed by strange attractors
to diverge: that slight
initial variance in warmth,
blown into unpredicted flight,
traces a storm-lobed butterfly,
a chaos. 

 
       * 

 
Nothing's out of reach now. 

My childhood books showed places
men had never gone,
and more that could be reached
only with death and hardship.
Now Marcia's husband Bill 
drills antarctic cores
and I could hire a chalet in Nepal. 

What's this unease?
Mere nostalgia for adventure—
exotic words, hard memsahibs
and seven-league boots?
A hunger to possess
by knowing, to taste
unending strangeness. 

But is it good to be so close?
How does sharpness
love softness? 
 
 
 
      *          * 
 
 
  
A tree in Chincua shivers 
with its copper fruit. 
Fifty years of wing tags
and now we know
where the storm-blown
wintering monarchs go. 

So does a father from Remedios,
holder of common land
since the great reform. 
So do the truck drivers, 
half the year's one crop already gone
to frost. So does the timber agent
who buys the logged fir: food 
for children, for the father
who approaches the forbidden tree
to cut. 
 
 
      *      *      * 
 
 
When I had breath, I used to read
for the blind. I could think 
of no worse fate
than to starve for words. 

Now your Sunday service 
is to drive me past the city 
through fields where summer 
thrives in vetch and milkweed. 
The world seen
once or twice a week
grows large again. 

Ahead the jointed studs
of half-framed tracts 
spell sentences against the late sun,
while two returning monarchs
glint nearby, 
braiding what I see 
with what I can't.  

I don't know any better
how to leave.
We could lose everything.