All summer, I watched them
make their ghostly caduceus through water—

fleeting, heraldic—

A time comes of silence and secret Sargassos,
the desolation of tourists and billboards,
a time of seamless ennui:

Sometimes, on evenings like this, my mother will speak of Tom Scott,
going down to a place inside her beyond the river’s high reach,
to a place where grief has no pallbearer except the river;

I saw it in a book on diseases of the mouth,
the smile that is heaven, the smile I cannot reach:
the youth known only by some gesture in the street

All day, we loitered at the throat of the penny arcade
to hear how the fisherman’s cast had taken the eye of Vilas
Puchomsky, a pain radiating down to the sexual curve.