The grinder says a freak is either born
or made. But he is paid to lie. The congress
I have known is complicated: that pickled

A man makes a film. 
He is a Jew, a midwestern
Jew, from Cincinnati.

The held cry of a hawk makes Thomas Hardy think
to make her believe it’s a newborn’s cry she hears.
Milk wets through her blouse. The other women know

That’s what I like best about you, Erato sighed in bed, that’s why
you’ve become one of my favorites and why you will always be so.
I grazed her ear with my tongue, held the salty lobe between my lips.

we all—Save the couple!—returned to pain,
some in Massachusetts, some in Kashmir
where, wet by turns, Order’s dry campaign

It happens like this: a kind of lethargy,
In my ears the sound of a clock chiming,
Thunder fading in the distance.

It was brief, she admitted, and never finished
and what there was, she thinks, was lost, in the mistakes
of lovers. No, she stopped carrying it, (so many mistakes

I will give myself to you smiling, crying, mutely screaming.

Because she believes in Kafka, wandering in the evening
in the labyrinths of his imagination.

There is a clearing one hopes one is coming to
magically and without accountability but with
grave understanding any minute like a thing