As we stood by the casket, Momma gasped,
through tears, “Look hard! You must remember her!”
I looked hard, tried to memorize the slight
malicious curl of her thin lips—too red—

The obverse of the sanguinary Turkey
Carpet I figured I was looking for‚
Festooned with geometric shapes in murky

Nothing melodramatic, it’s just when the sunlight
came in through the wired windows and laid itself
down on the green floor, it was nice, we liked it
there, then, playing our games. And like kids

Very woman the tomato
cut up cool and floating in gumbo,
so rice the okra swans!
Spoons prowl the soup, poking flotsam:

Tuned to 104.6 on the FM
dial, the boom box purrs Golden
Oldies I jerk awake to. You
turn beside me, to me, but turning,

I think you would understand
my craft of writing, how it makes of me
your king and creature in this no-man’s-land
of the moment;

Fred,
I don’t know what to do.
About me and you and the dream
which knocks and knocks at me, now has

So the hip rises, oh so slightly, in its golden socket
and music continues despite the dawn

The lion threw his head back and sang two notes like a veery

The forest comes down at night. She waits until the last tram has left, then sets off. She meets the drunks—with eyes half-shut they pass through her, they stumble but don’t curse. The forest walks steadily on. 

That day in winter: the rows
of shabby cages, stacked
like death-camp bunk beds,
in which tiger kittens gamboled,