Along the rented sands of New York bight
used bandages and needles wash ashore.
The summer islanders are in a roar,
reduced to August in a living hell

They love me.
Each morning they fill the strongbox
in my chest with grass
and salt pellets—I have good hallucinations.

Maresfield Gardens, his last address.
The exiled Old Man talking less and less,
Too aware of his steel jaw’s clicking
And the fifty minute hours ticking

“Mère d’amour et fille de la Mer!”
Over the golden ocean waves of hair
Plunge, bright with her origin, where we

Atop
The lily stems
A handiwork of Spring
The lily castles

Blood flares from the nostrils.
The lungs, the enormous watermelon bellows,
are lined with it.
Legs conduits,

Sleeping within earshot of the Aegean
once more, I forget where I am
a second & mistake the surfs white noise
for rain, unheard-of here

The madhouse statuary seemed to dispel the pre-life we gave it. 
in sleep, to become the one bauble rescued from that  hoard, whose shapes 
no one now will know. It cannot be said they existed. Yet

‘We went to New York,’ Kathy said.
‘Colin was painting well then, and he was
on the edge of a breakthrough, he said.
Breakdown was more like it. He was drinking,

The unsigned architecture of loneliness
is becoming taller, finding a way farther
above the horizontal flowering
of the Cold War, the peonies