with passport in hand

with license with photo

with registration card

reading both of the provisions

under penalty

I signed my name

twice

that I was who I was

and lived where I lived

and had not moved.

I read

I wrote.

I read

I write

and I walk to the polls

in their footsteps.

if I am will against will

then there is no movement —

no blair, no birdsong in

the back of my mind: I am

block-head

grasses

japanese red maple

dogwood

plum

in autumn

a curve

toward

and in the back of the

hemisphere, a small circle of

rest

the house was constructed with one round door and one round window,

a roof covered with shingles,

reinforced with a beam between two walls.

for the end of that man is peace

psalm 37, reconsidered

I lived in a house with four levels, incredible.
first floor, second, cellar, attic, which was my
space, all mine, my mind. with two dormered
windows, in each of two rooms, Palladian,
small palladian windows, of glass that
had passed the hundred-year mark as we
came to live in it. At the end of my street, at the turn
at the end of the block, was a crossroad
with the name of the roads that together signaled
the named of the place I was born. I navigated
these rooms. And knew corners and contours. Imagined
into beyond, and back past what connected
to what was unconnected and what might
become linked over caesura, leap over the little break,
that misfiring synapse going across that space –
so much room in that house of time –
foundation of granite, roof of slate. I navigated
that space for twelve years. Incredible.
and when I left, like the emigrant,
I reached and retched. Ahimè!
That space [is] inscribed into me
my brain my body

my feet have been set down into a wide room

And they will differ – if they do –

As Syllable from Sound –