Gently summoned, Joseph came. My robe lay open. And?
   He shut his eyes!

Oh, not that you don’t smile: in paint, you do.
How often pranks and cracks paid off the gloom!

Rumor, the homemade metamorphosis;
That with each telling modifies its key
Adjectives, its semicolons; that scales

Beginning with a fundamental, which
Sounds tonic depths, then reasons up from there,
The will to truth parts company with prayer

Entering a cave, or stepping outside at night,
artificial blindness, temporary
but absolute. And if I lost sight,

I took the water she gave me, a dark young woman
in a “Spanish,” off the shoulder, ruffled blouse—
a cover girl, almost (like the maiden on the Sun-
Maid raisin box), remembering to smile for tourist

Posters of Juliette Greco, the Eiffel
Tower. A good French bistro in the Village,
Its cuisine by some oversight not yet
Widely known; all the more murmured over

No one but the prodigal returns.
Extravagance, the same as parsimony,
disguised a bent for pillaging oneself?

Because dusk comes in not long
after 5 o’clock in Chelsea
and lamps come to life, a gold

Telling our story is . . . painful as anything
I’ve ever done. More painful than. A lapse
Of time so long and I’d assumed, wrongly,

It was where the wooden bridge
crosses to Porto Corsini on the open sea
and a few men, in slow motion, lower

Eternal Aphrodite, Zeus’s daughter, throne
Of inlay, deviser of nets, I entreat you:
Do not let a yoke of grief and anguish weigh

An emptied wineglass
White windows reflect in
Billowing like sails.

Unwrap the message hidden in a wound
Or a word: a branching spray of avowals, cut.