I sat at the bedside,
as I’d seen my sister do.
I told him things
I never dreamed I knew.

I took the water she gave me, a dark young woman
in a “Spanish,” off the shoulder, ruffled blouse—
a cover girl, almost (like the maiden on the Sun-
Maid raisin box), remembering to smile for tourist

If Marius should ask himself, roused by the night,
Have the gods forgotten me?

The bright green bulbs of apples crop up overnight.
I didn’t dream their soggy thup on the lawn
or the tree’s tarnished sconces for those home-grown bulbs
that dawn kindles, then eclipses.

I listened hard. I do not believe in ghosts.
  The house was changing. Indeed, I never saw
Such thorough renovation.“You do not know,”

The limbs of the giant spruce that leans
  So close to the house, have formed
A kind of stair, a walkway

Little Yuri in her very best clothes
charges off across the white sand,
etches a circle in return.

Wordless I watch
the faded evening glow, cloudlike
in the window of this late city train,

I drink
make Yuri cry
get scared, lose heart

I wonder if phlogiston theorists
were lovers, if it began when they
were set off, like the brown grass