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

Look up. Your life is suddenly ending—
the pages yellow, the lamplight yellow—
the face of someone you love the halo

On the door, the butcher’s quaint bell—like an altar boy’s—
rings my arrival. This is the introit, it says, the butcher’s apron
pink with intimations of blood.

Then into the hurricane's eye
comes a god wearing a mask of the most crushable petals

A frail insistence now emerges
into the effulgence of broad daylight.

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.