The birds with fiery plumage perched
like epaulets on the general’s statue

At the edge of the world
where Ocean begins and ends
the great serpent consuming its own tail

At the bus stop a blind man sells colored pencils.
Ballpoint pens, too, at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Ten cents for a pencil, two bits for a pen.

In the Kyi Valley of Tibet, a snow-white desert
where an orchestra of lamas performs by starlight for the gods,
it is said that when we near death, and may least suspect it,

The doors have been removed from their hinges
and the windows are boarded up
in anticipation of the hurricane

I have seem them growing wild by the hundreds
along a riverbank on a Pacific island.
As I dipped my oars silently so as not to frighten

After washing your face and leaving it
in the basin of water from which it stared
up at you as you left the room,

Here is a piece of required reading 
at the end of our century
the end of a millenium that began with the crusades

The Hyperboreans—“people beyond the North Wind” —
according to Diodorus Siculus, inhabited an island
from which the moon “appears to be but a little

Displayed in the coin shop window 
below the Spanish doubloons and Flemish guilders, 
in a row of talismans on felt cushions, 

A wall of fire steals across the prairie 
and the string quartet in the downstairs parlor 
breaks off suddenly when a blizzard of light invades our sleep,