A full ten minutes at sunset, hundreds of crows fly south over the woods. Moments after the last one, snow blows in from the north. I follow sheep trails across the fields, unwind details I have been avoiding, mental terrain more suited for moose than human. Mom's two birthday balloons cling together in her dining room for a day, before one migrates to the kitchen and the other moves into her bedroom. A day later, the bedroom balloon floats into Dad's study to stay just above the books. Dad must be directing this scene from beyond. In my dream, he fades into view in the doorway holding a basketball, says nothing, watches while I read on the sofa, then drifts away. Grief wants me to call it by name, knows all 360 joints in my body, tapes their seams to keep itself from floating into oblivion.

1. Magnets use nasty metals from weird, temperamental parts of the periodic table, elusive rare-earth lanthanides that may corrupt our future. 2. I visit Chopin's heart in Warsaw, while the rest of his body lies in Paris, and wonder where the music comes from. 3. Some people have thrown sea creatures onto the ice during hockey games, and long ago during a political conflict someone in the pub handed around Cornflakes boxes full of handguns. Some people interpret favors as interference, and a warning appears in the newspaper Jumble game words: CARRY TABOO UNLIKE WARMTH. 4. Some days I don't know split beans from coffee, subsist on memories, try to sweep the edges of chaos into some semblance of tidiness. Water slips off my elbow in the shower in a haphazard way, but tears don't drop or fall down the drain. 5. My father falls and falls, and falls again until he is carried away. He wears the bashful grin of a boy in a man's body, holds only a snatched book of poems by Verlaine.

for my mother, in memory of my father Rest with me on golden cloth, tell me of birds that transcend borders-- the feather that brushed you in the night as I passed through, an unexpected collage of cardinals, chickadees and crows near the lake determined to sing despite bitter cold, the red-tailed hawk outside its realm that watched from the railway bridge as you followed me to the woods where bluebirds nest in spring rain. Pull up your socks--there is much to take in. Living Coral is the color of the year, Schubert and Mozart await your hands, frost-kissed carrots want to sing a sweet musical palette on your tongue. Do not grieve, imperfect dreamer, for I've seen the sun rise and set on Pluto in shades of blue. I've flown beyond our giant green teardrop that drowns in the darkness between stars.

If polar bears can sniff prey from 16 kilometres away, best return home when you lie on the grass and its blades nip your back, stipple the surface of the day with regret. Or wait with false alertness until the bite disappears, your mouth roofless. Let the wind blow until the lost pieces of the afternoon take you with them to remind you that mother said, "Hope is faintly alive yet unknown disaster may be in the wind." Are these days the nadir of your existence? Mirror blessed with memory, you are a time loop, polar ice caps are melting, and polar bears approach.

Locked in the psychiatric ward the patients may or may not see Christmas lights this year, or get to brush their hair, but one has seen stigmata on her toes. She says alien life forms drew wavy brown lines on broccoli stems in her lunch left on the floor of her room where they allow nothing that can be thrown. She offers me the vegetable, but I won't eat it either. When I won't get her out of there, she tells me who I am with a streak of righteousness: someone who is always busy doing nothing of significance. A priest walks through my fevered dreams, past bright colored shirts laid on the floor like lights ready to be strung, wipes his runny nose. Even the holy are ill during Advent this year. In the setting sun, power lines like strings of lights shine on a hand-lettered sign tossed onto a snowbank: Seeking someone who knows me.

I could measure (but I don't) spring's abrupt return sudden dandelions how fast water rushes from underground Jupiter's arrival at opposition the moon's indifferent attitude. Gravity pulls on my spine (that delicate nerve) leaves me chasing memories not of your convulsions during the late-night seizure but of lavender cut back in the fall and the particular way birds converse in the evening just before rain.

A lost hen walked down our city driveway this morning, headed for a better spot in the pecking order, or perhaps someone's evening soup. The drumbeat in the song on the car radio sounded exactly like the turn signal, or the hen's tapping feet, and I tried in vain to turn it off. I received news of my mother: The toe that was bothering her has been taken care of. When your feet hurt, you hurt all over, so now she will stand and sleep in comfort: Huzzah! When my daughter was young, she used to write things on small pieces of paper, random phrases such as: ask the corn foot club or: the boot cracks in sore fury. Take me on a tour of the generations, weave straight lines into curves, let me feel the ache of evolution. Where words leave off, what begins? My hands feel the motions, braid invisible hair.

I almost forgot about you once-- in the turning basin of a dream. Lost the sweet taste of your hand that offered polished stones the color of red wine. I pulled my nest together, held a bunny to my ear-- warm and soft, full of whooshing sounds--wished for the ocean. Found myself muttering like a fool, "For the rain it raineth every day." The mind does what it does, follows its own elusive tidal roll of mulled comedy. The gentle power behind the stars pays no mind to my storms.

My lip splits in the same place every morning when I smile, flowering words bleed onto the floor. How many pages will it take to get through the desert? The nursing home residents, for whom nothing else can be done, recite, "If today I am to do nothing, I will do it gallantly," but vultures eat the noise of prayer. Life's beginning, an absurd lottery, its end, a failed experiment. Pack grace and patience to deal with those who use years and pounds to quantify respect, who see only inconvenience at the end of life. Human wisdom is not cumulative. The drip torch lights a controlled burn, and wildfire on the move sounds like a train. We seek grapes in the bramble bush, seize the elders' dreams, rush onward.

A single milkweed plant has sprung from seeds scattered last fall. I almost fancy myself a gardener, except that so much potential died with those plants that didn't grow. A door left open says forgiven, the only word not worn away from the top of a gravestone where sumac's summer green reveals the art of dying.