The last words the sea spoke
before it died, the last sigh
of the great wind that blew

Once a woman went into the woods.
The birds were silent. Why? she said.
Thunder, they told her,

Bedecked with scapulars,
heavy with huge crosses
and crying out abroad,

Monna Vanna stares out—disdainfully? no, actually she is very young, 
Beautiful, following the style of the time, and that is a  certain stylish look; she has on a lot of clothes. 
And Benjamin Franklin with a stamp pasted over his features 

A tiny creature moves
through the tide pool, holding up
its little fortress foretelling

Three hot-eyed kids hard on a fix’s heels.
Enraged that the cash he had on him was small,
Did in James Edmondson, famed vaudeville’s

      Anything but rotten, such flowers are ill 
named, remaining exempt from the compost fate 
      by a decorum of fatigue, keeping still 

The breaking of things can look like an origination
But then reveal itself, through lights shimmering in fragments 
Of smashed glass, as having occurred too late to have given

In a bookshelf at the dark livingroom’s end
stood the ten volumes of Journeys Through Bookland
which my parents bought when I was born.

I look round the cluttered
icons of your room:
quilt, photo, stuffed bird.