will mark the completion,at last,
of nearly ten years’ design.

How beautiful and vast and bright and empty
inside the quick-stop’s inextinguishable glow.

Right on schedule, one century behind
The little bird on William Wordsworth’s cuckoo clock
Emerged from Time Itself, a home, to cuckoo.

(Attic krater, attributed to Lydos)

Hera, as you recall, once bore a son
so puny that she dropped him in disgust

The pilot light shines up through each stove ring
with crowns of flame, hours before breakfast
on our last day. The refrigerator is purring;

They are there in every weather
in my imagination,
as they were in the mountain town

 How could I not have taken him home:
his eyes shone a gentian blue,
his name was Jesus, and I found him alone

On the way to Mass, by chance,
I spotted you on the boulevard at a café
with your wife and her mother. 

A thin gold catch like a bee’s stinger—
    but there are no bees in winter—
lost from a necklace of honey-colored beads,

The bodies line this lake of suicides.
I visit the locked shed
Where lovers carve their summer oaths. Inside