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

To get proper grapes you’ve got to
breathe on them some,
fog ’em up, thin the skins.

Seen that sign, back west a ways?
The one on the warehouse, in a movie marquee?
Blessed Hope, it says. Blessed Hope, she said.

The Hyperboreans—“people beyond the North Wind” —
according to Diodorus Siculus, inhabited an island
from which the moon “appears to be but a little

Here is a piece of required reading 
at the end of our century
the end of a millenium that began with the crusades