Once, in a room no bigger than the bed, 
I made love with a girl.

                                                *

Have you ever made love with a girl?   
Once I hadn’t, then I had.

 

Of the vastness of clouds
We knew nothing;
We slept in houses underground.

The newborn bear has no shape.
The mule rarely gives birth,
The viper only once.

1.

In retrospect I'd been waiting
For years, never speaking.
Never needing to learn. I listened

Snow, rocks darker than any shadow in the world.
We glimpsed another life below us—cottages, goats—

But never imagined it would be so difficult.

I was so young that I invented loss,
The image of the mother’s face receding
On the far edge of the broken bed,

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
And stuffs his vacant garments with his form.

The backward glance forbidden in the mind,
Uncertain, gentle, and without impatience

The birds don’t sing around the bungalow,
They cough, they sputter, congregate and yell.

Unfair—indecent—that your body would
Display, where everyone could see,
The name of someone whom you didn’t love.

Hear their voices as they scamper through
A backlit meadow, unaware of me.

Because at home, a hundred years ago
On Adriatic cliffs, it fed on seed pods,
Shaking nature’s handouts free.

Soon I was born a little past
  The celebrations on the Champ de Mars.
    Now who can recognize himself?

The natural world incinerated
To the rocks we sit on, nothing more.

  Where the rock divides among the mosses
    And the myrtle weaves its crown.