My brain had been swiped clean.
I couldn’t love
songs I loved; friends came

 By year’s end, some couples used book lights,
or even night-lights, so as not to make love
in total dark. What some told, others took in

Never receives visitors, only inhabitants.
Outside, icicles thaw from the eaves in winter,
And even with its windows painted shut,

Not just because a child draws him — pie-faced and frontal, 
Grinning—it’s hard to watch the man’s head and hands take shape 
From a black magic marker, despite the other colors in the box: 

Chlorine and languor and vaporous
Threads rising like the steam off soup,
This brackish whirlpool wrinkles us,

Our eyes nearly shut, we hadn’t planned
       To talk of death, when the word
            Itself, like a jolt