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.

The mouths of her shadows are pursed by time
to suck sun-lit memories from the wood.
Freezing damp and candle-smut have raised

Strollers, diapers, bottles overwhelm
the young mother in the nether reaches
of life after birth no one told her about,

The burnt-red fox darts in front
of the car’s path late at night,
and I’d like to call this an encounter,

Actually, it was sweet and heavy with juice
and we passed it back and forth, a river
of nectar running down her chin and mine

And spring once more, the sun made its rounds
over the mountainside
above our drafty house where the weak had lain

All day, we loitered at the throat of the penny arcade
to hear how the fisherman’s cast had taken the eye of Vilas
Puchomsky, a pain radiating down to the sexual curve.

I saw it in a book on diseases of the mouth,
the smile that is heaven, the smile I cannot reach:
the youth known only by some gesture in the street

Sometimes, on evenings like this, my mother will speak of Tom Scott,
going down to a place inside her beyond the river’s high reach,
to a place where grief has no pallbearer except the river;