We were inmates of an orphanage in Kraków;
A prison in Panama;
A school for the blind in Genoa.

Silence and ungridded space, from the tipped back glass
Of cross-hair sights angled through flensed white birch.

It made you less as well as more than human

always another moment
drawing back

I had been searching the hill for a vision.
And unabashed as if waiting he came into sight.

No, we cannot be the amorous ballet the tourist
      requires for a backdrop—

In this respect the patriarch was almost certainly
      mistaken

nothing that you can hear
but the cold creek moving
over the old pebbles

  and that’s how I almost died
     of foolishness
        in beautiful Florida.

Why do it? shrilled the bird,
the as-yet-unnamed, a
candidate for new coinage,
namely widewit,