I stand before this landscape at dusk
   jacklighted, caught in the high beams,
shocked into stillness, rapt, incapable

The grinder says a freak is either born
or made. But he is paid to lie. The congress
I have known is complicated: that pickled

2. The Room in Which an Orange Is the Only Light

 

His coughing woke him, wrecked him (or his father’s

hammer did) and broke the spell like molten iron