At sunset the mill workers convene at the tavern
talking of their children and how they bathed them in a cistern.
One man compared the evening sunset to his boy's letter

I make this line
my beast
of claw of tooth

Who killed Cock Robin?
Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?
What’s in the cupboard?

He disappeared, often, even as he was speaking,
though he could finish those sentences
from which he had disengaged himself,

"Death is also the thief of beauty," he says,
as a slow disquietude replaces morning's calm.
The pink light fades from ashen clouds,

LOVE at last became incarnate,
the memory is horror.

Gothic flowers bedded themselves
in the edges of this night, the night
when a bullet pierced her rib precisely,

Flecked on a layer of mortar on the pillbox lid,
the tiles pieced together by some kindred myopic
have caught this much of Tuscany: hills worn down

Blackout-in the theater as well as on screen. From a distance
we hear Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians." It almost
sounds like a train approaching. Now we hear voices: by turns

Not smart to be out under trees with the wind still this
high: billowing & breaking bring down stob ends
of last year's drought-wood that died way up in the branches,