To the living, the words for death are like the dead. 
When they come calling, they’re difficult to make out, 
ragged at the edges, unaccountable ghosts, 

“Feel me to do right,” your father whispered
to you out of the blue of two silences:
his shyness, his dying. How beautifully

Why I hate to be up in the air,
dangling in a car on a wire strung between two alps
above the village of Chamonix,

Displayed in the coin shop window 
below the Spanish doubloons and Flemish guilders, 
in a row of talismans on felt cushions, 

What compensation shall we say
Confronts a fractured energumen, awaits the devotee of day?

And then his name was their name (Forethought,
Premonition, how the word had frightened them!),

In Kolonaki’s glassy labyrinth,
At any corner I run into her

Years back, your great, your undone work before you
Still, in that Champs café, flushed from Pernod,

He’d scoop up cheeks, as sweet and sour
As rotting apricots

Until he followed her into the stairwell
of the parking garage, he was no one.