In Jaime’s picture of the world, a heart
As big as South America shines out,
The center of the only ocean. Three
Stick figures (one is labeled “me”) are drawn
Beside the world, as if such suffering
Could make us more objective. Jaime’s bald

I know this really isn’t Spain. But still,
You’d think I’d find my father here, his lips
On every cup. You’d think the holly bush
Weren’t quite so sharp. I think Rumanian
Is coming from my favorite table in
The back. Are all these people reading Lorca?

I didn’t know there could be so many silences
listening in on our conversation,
or having their own conversations

  A daffodil from Emily’s lot
I lay beside her headstone
on the first day of May.

On his knees, his back to us: the pale honeydew melons of his
        bare buttocks, the shapely, muscular hemispheres—

        the voluptuous center.

To the living, the words for death are like the dead. 
When they come calling, they’re difficult to make out, 
ragged at the edges, unaccountable ghosts, 

“Feel me to do right,” your father whispered
to you out of the blue of two silences:
his shyness, his dying. How beautifully

Why I hate to be up in the air,
dangling in a car on a wire strung between two alps
above the village of Chamonix,

Displayed in the coin shop window 
below the Spanish doubloons and Flemish guilders, 
in a row of talismans on felt cushions, 

In Kolonaki’s glassy labyrinth,
At any corner I run into her
And don’t. At Zonar’s now: an electrolier