I walk along the shore.
Wind’s salt tongue licks my face.
And see—beyond the swells

Insomnia, my cousin,
you have sired nightly
indecent vertigo.

Sublimation, a new version of piety.
Hovers the paint and gets her going.
Everything drifts, a barely heard sigh is the

At bottom, a drowned harvester.
Sure as the spent soap slick
across the pool’s deep side.

It is both the coffin-worn hammer
and the hassle we walk under,
sans spouses, those shields

You hire a guide. See several waterfalls,
a dock for a boat, and, indeed, a boat.
You rock to a shore where bats rise as gulls.

The day our wives left, we gathered their things
in brown, worsted sacks and burned them
in the garden, scattering the ashes

Urging our oxen toward the risen sun,
our stick plows stirring up the dust in waves,
also, in waves, we taste those words come back,

Palermo. Along the dock, boys greet our boat,
turn cartwheels for five lire coins (inferior
brass I try bending with my teeth, once),

The cardinal’s cursed us with another spring
and the vines awake to exercise their rights,
nearly burying the side wall: full, gorgeous,