Amy Newman fall to. 1. To begin (a physical activity) energetically. 2. To shut or move into place by itself. Is it exhaustion that lets the body wander, and travel at infinite degree toward wanting? Leashed to the myth with what's remaindered: feral planets of desire that punctuate, like commas, the long phrases of our wanting. Dreaming hurts at the ripped seams of it, and I dream. Across the yard the beautiful endures in brutal, climacteric trees. They loosen at the limbs, a loss of memory, and as the things descend they say a prayer about their fall. And some leaves twitch like feeling at the light, and close themselves against all touch, this motor impulse I admire. While I might open out, like tongue, I'll snap to my within as swift as touch, and red as underskin, a darkened mouth, and wish the fill of it. At night, the husband wanders, carries in his arms like flowers his vast love, and I begin a bloom for him — with all my silly flesh, the rest of it, in spite of, or because our human love — the complicated body of dimension — it's just too rich, we all but haul it up in these electrical disturbances and shapes: the braiding of our lungs, their candied net, striated muscle, and little hearts as soft as birds — these private, bright assays against a calendar of myth and stain, against the immaterial they also love. The body is devout, and when we are entwined of limb, we look like praying hands, we shape our faith, we marvel in the imitated world. The end of a cable, rope, or chain that is pulled by the power source in hoisting. The repetition, with shaped variation, of sunlight refreshing the eastern trunk of the pines in a metaphor for God. Moss's metaphor for God to blanket the fallen gray of the forest trees. The deer turns her head as a metaphor for God in the wild edge of the disordered wood. White-throated sparrow thrice locates her metaphor for God in the distillation of thin, wondering breath, high pitch emerged from a mix of her thinking, the singing, in her small wet heart, and beating its arc in uncertain richness to touch, in increasing, diminutive lessenings — as snow fall, as fabric furled out, as a hand through the breeze feels the presence of other — the air only seeming acceptance, to let birdsong travel: Meanwhile, extending their bodies they feather the present tense, the moment, the turbine, foreseeable hushed in the eye, to try the air as conduit for finding, with treble song: once, twice, verify. Against such a desire, the land extends whatever it has to the upward, the visual above, which gilds the wondering, where air erodes to some attenuated rapture, a gap where meaning gathers up its flaws. Against this persistence, bird song falling, repeated patterning, over other holy gestures, other estimations: a water strider proves the surface tension of the metaphor for God is equal to his reverent body in the blue dark underneath. Seraphic ferns undo themselves in Prime by looking upward, compose their leaves in evening's Compline metaphor for God. Though an open window cool air compels itself to warmer air's metaphor for God. Asking only this. Amy Newman is the author of three books of poetry: Order, or Disorder , Camera Lyrica and Fall. Her work has won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, the Beatrice Hawley Award, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and three State Individual Artists Fellowships. She is anthologized in the forthcoming The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, and her work has been translated into Italian and Romanian.