and I started again
with a smell, not yet a memory, earth beginning
   to drink from tiny roots in my head’s dark garden

The customer, he wants only
the liver, the size of a lover’s earlobe

When he leaves, you see a black pig
in the hallway vanishing, returning

The blossoms, and there are hundreds,
carry each a touch of salt.

Call the sparrows in the yellow tree yellow.
They are brown. Call her hip the arc
of the day where it disturbs

Only then did it feel like waking.
Never, nothing. What could he have told her?

Convenient, all these travails,
how easily they are compiled.
And we pronounce our lives tragic!

And of course, that banker on the ledge:
“They don’t worry about a thing, the dead!”

What did we want, waiting all day for storm clouds to
     reach us,

Where’s the blown-glass mirror to show each other
what we both fear, what we sing to disprove?