With Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude
Debussy turned to sleeping figures:
the garden was growing cold, its trees

He was struck with awe at the sight of them:
a shoal lifting above the water's surface;
each head trained to his voice's timbre,

My mind long gone, having forgot to shut the body
             off, I will lie in some spare room,
some former nursery, entranced by waiting for death

Sunlight sang through the chick door's crack.
   And I heard her words,
         yet chose not to wake my brother,

He waited for her the last time
in the Cafe Eichberger, at their table:
walls the color of chocolate, tiles worn

You could be turning it in your fingers like a planet.
A knife would do, if you're good with knives,
bracing the hard fruit in your slender hand;

It is
so snug—
the skin

A bestiary catalogs
bests. The mediocres
both higher and lower

For we want to make off 
with things that are not
our own. There is a pleasure

His cleaned-out body—and laid before it
a thousand of bread, beer, oxen, fowl,
and every good thing. His gratitude