Then into the hurricane's eye
comes a god wearing a mask of the most crushable petals

We’ve shaved the skull to a caramel swell.
Note the roseate, cardinal designs

The trout-boned woman upstairs
Wakes my wife and baby daughter

The derring-do of the Soviet troops.

                                I watch the big bird from
an evil star, honking across the sky. Every day

At 47, Hope's driven to find her feet in construction.

Supine on a gurney below the Acropolis tacked
to the ceiling, my right leg slowly turning
cement, I'm an accidental artifact of Pompeii

As for disappointments she’s had her share,
joining now with the horizon’s grief

and I wander around on the ceiling
in my funeral clothes among the gaudy
mushrooms of lightbulbs until I am struck

lit like a field of deplorable ice
then plunged back into their own birdlessness.