They called it a landslide as though 
everything shifted and the weak 
and strong alike were buried alive.

In Klee’s “Mural from the Temple of Longing”
Thick, dark arrows from each skyscraper window
Head “thither” in opposite directions, into

It was hard climbing in the stifling heat
With my enormous belly up that hill
But, probably, the belly stood me well.

Achilles is tired of crying. 
It occurs to him
one day in June

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

With magazines that give the latest medical advice:
“Do patients want to think it was genetic?
Or luck; or what they drank, lounging in the sun?”

The bed, the laminated stand,
With soap on it and towels, folded, four, five,
Piled like snow.

“She turned her face to the wall.” The Wing, of the Dove.
Marcel: “At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall…”

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