We trapped him—
the dignified male
with the graceful neck—

The duck dead and gutted,
we walk the vaulted cavity
to the heart; large,

—Yes, my friend, making my grave rounds. Our mother’s there,
my brother too, and the wife’s niece, buried last year,
   only seventeen, leukemia, it seems. And you, sir?

You spoiled something back there at the beginning,
a vowel, a syllable, a word,
and the poem’s inedible now,

As the Catalonians do, I eat the eyes at once.
My brawny palms flatten their mainstays.
I pop the shells with my thumbs, then crunch.

Suppose Gauguin bad never seen Tahiti. Suppose the beche-de-mer and sandalwood trade bad not materialized
and the Polynesian gods held fast in the fruit of Nuku Hiva and the milk-and-honey waters of Eiao.

The nymph whom Paris swears he never knew
From lofty Ida sends these scribbled few
Words to him to whom she still is true.

Cursed be the day the gilded youth of Greece
Aboard the Argo sought the golden fleece!
When we in Colchis saw this foreign ship

She was not the builder of model airplanes.
She was not the runner I never could be.
She was not the pillager of my bookshelves,

“Champs Elysées of Broadway” says the awning
of the café where, every Sunday morning,
young lawyers in old jeans ripped at the knees