Like I get this phone call from Shirley MacLaine,
it's the middle of the night, right,
she's all confused about time,

To all those driven berserk or humanized by love
this is offered, for I need help
deciphering my dream.

Gothic flowers bedded themselves
in the edges of this night, the night
when a bullet pierced her rib precisely,

Flecked on a layer of mortar on the pillbox lid,
the tiles pieced together by some kindred myopic
have caught this much of Tuscany: hills worn down

Blackout-in the theater as well as on screen. From a distance
we hear Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians." It almost
sounds like a train approaching. Now we hear voices: by turns

Not smart to be out under trees with the wind still this
high: billowing & breaking bring down stob ends
of last year's drought-wood that died way up in the branches,

Just before the war, a foreign film crew burst into Ruža’s village
and turned the country idyll into chaos: prefabricated shacks
appeared, houses were quickly painted and skilled foreigners

When the National Library burned for three days in August,
the town was choked with snow. Those days I could not find
a single pencil in the house, and even when I grabbed one

At the beginning of the war, the streets resembled a promenade
of the most beautiful dogs, abandoned by their masters
who had run away from the burning town. Behind them remained

greener than Eden, a shock of bliss to see
just past the stew and suck of reeking waters,
the earth ate sunshine under the olive trees.