Leather banquettes in old green edge the room.
A drab green of animal scales, guarded
Under agave, on days too hot to move.

It’s driving into all that goldness makes
You blind, she said. The road oats, timothy
The mustard hung beside the highway like

To get proper grapes you’ve got to
breathe on them some,
fog ’em up, thin the skins.

Seen that sign, back west a ways?
The one on the warehouse, in a movie marquee?
Blessed Hope, it says. Blessed Hope, she said.

The Hyperboreans—“people beyond the North Wind” —
according to Diodorus Siculus, inhabited an island
from which the moon “appears to be but a little

Here is a piece of required reading 
at the end of our century
the end of a millenium that began with the crusades

On this small island that undoes us daily,gently,
It’s hard to take too seriously, too intently
A town whose name means town

Drones out brittle, weary invocations, the certainty
                                      of fruit now distant as the first word
On God’s tongue. Such disarray. So much leaf-rot,

It was foolish planning to arrive at noon 
But, in retrospect, it doesn’t really matter. 
There was a bar, after all, where we bought water 

Once in the sweet dark of an empty house,
All alone while the others slept upstairs,
I knelt before a memorial candle