Although the field lay cut in swaths.
Grass at the edge survived the crop:
Stiff stems with lateral blades of leaf.

Eternal Aphrodite, Zeus’s daughter, throne
Of inlay, deviser of nets, I entreat you:
Do not let a yoke of grief and anguish weigh

All my life I’ve had goals to go after, goals
in a molten distance. And just the way snows
in the distance, dense and white among groves

Are exhibitions of bad taste on a scale
Beyond belief, filling your living room
With mud or lava, blowing the schoolhouse roof

It was where the wooden bridge
crosses to Porto Corsini on the open sea
and a few men, in slow motion, lower

Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Jaurès
dies in a wine-puddle. Who or what stares
through the café-window créped in powder-smoke?

There are more of us. We came out of a time when birth was happy.

Somebody’s aunt out swabbing her birdbath
with Lysol and the town paper mill down the block
is beginning to blister in a clean shock

You must remove your sleepmask, haul it
from your eyes, sleep a white sleep without
slapping floodwaters—let it go,

On the banks of the beautiful Loire,
There was my birth and my cradle.
Two kinds of goods flow from that land: