The story is always the same story,
With every step retraced;
They tell the story in Buenos Aires

Thousands upon thousands of grains of sand,
Rivers that know no rest, the sparkling white
Snowflake more delicate than a shadow, light

   Through the peephole he could see a boy
Playing patience on the huge crimson sofa.
    There was the turkey, the second-best

I am writing from a place you have never been,
Where the trains don’t run, and planes
Don’t land, a place to the west,

The truth is none of our business.
Our adolescent eye-at-the-keyhole rooting
In a sweetheart’s soiled linen for a clue

“For a few years, I managed to eke out
       a meagre living as The Human Yo-Yo.”
But I tired of the unnatural activity,

The masts are mostly gone, Walt. Pleasure-sailors
ply the harbor, piloting fiberglass forty-footers
down from the North Shore, one at the wheel,

Here are the parrots, she says, which Mayor Washington,
the Mayor of Chicago,
in that apartment on Lake Michigan

My Daddy slapped my hand against my cheek.
“Don’t hit yourself. Why are you hitting yourself?”
He held my wrists, and laughed. I cried. My hands,

One night in Portugal, alone in a forlorn
village at twilight, escaping her parents,
she saw a full moon baptized on the water