Fist to fist with tulips, glads, selving and unselving
daffodils, they work their metamorphoses in loam

I knew you as pain, as specific need,
as the cold thing that was foreign.

Could you enter, once again,
what’s possible, what you made?

No daylight ghosts among my flesh.
I am a candle pulling at the dark.

There are days I can understand
why you would want to board
broad back of some ship

What do you make of that odd one by the door,
his silk top hat and greatcoat folded
neatly beside his chair, a sketchbook flapped

Ardea Candidissima, snowy
Heron or White
Egret, printed London 1835, not

You lived here once. City—remember?—
of formerly your own, of the forever beloved,
of the dead,

Just after Ludwig II's death the surgeons opened
   below his ribs and removed his heart:
it's now preserved, indeed enshrined, in a silver vase

Who am I who speaks to you?

Though that’s not it exactly. Try this. What behind the eyes had looked out so central, so