When a place is too beautiful, there will be repercussions. Such places attract disruptions, encroachments, noxious pollutants of sound and deed.

He gave me a spruce lap desk
for writing in bed that Christmas.
It was rubbed into fragrance with oil of almond

Our friends die with us
    and the sky too
         in huge swatches, and lakes, and places

Today I wished without mercy
in the bloodless nations of the mind
that a city had gone down with you

The sparrows drop to my plate, their
tiny drumsticks clamped to their sides

as if they’d given themselves a tree, a sky
full of companions, song
that can travel.