Our friends die with us
    and the sky too
         in huge swatches, and lakes, and places

He gave me a spruce lap desk
for writing in bed that Christmas.
It was rubbed into fragrance with oil of almond

Our eyes nearly shut, we hadn’t planned
       To talk of death, when the word
            Itself, like a jolt

Chlorine and languor and vaporous
Threads rising like the steam off soup,
This brackish whirlpool wrinkles us,

The sign itself is shab you need, blue neon half-circling
a curvy silhouette. And rain spilling the gutters
seems the perfect stage effect.

Kicking through woods and fields, I’d spooked several
and once stepped on a coachwhip among gravestones,
at least one garter curled like a bow

It’s dawn. Has this lamp finished, then,
Its task of hope, hand resting
In the mirror fogged up over the fever

You were sculpted on a prow,
Time wore you away as the foam might have done,
It closed your eyes one stormy night,

Dozens of burning, fish-shaped clouds dove for the horizon,
determined to make more of an already explosive sunset.

In 1027, not far from Bernburg,
eighteen peasants were seized
by a common delusion.