She said as the cab passed the building
She’d passed in her childhood, is pathos.
Its mean little whip of pity. The force field filled

God’s nose-end,
White nothing tower,
White-bearded, socketed face.

Little liquor-drink umbrellas drowse
At the margin of the mouth hole,
The moon eye, an open coronal

And tightens until language can’t bear this
Hollowing, crash cart, Please. In the silence,
A bus slithers by.

Love is like a garden in the heart, he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens. “In the cities,”

The sound of women hidden
among the lemon trees. A sweetness
that can live with the mind, a familiarity

I was getting water tonight
off-guard when I saw the moon
in my bucket and was tempted

The shadows behind people walking
in the bright piazza are not merely
gaps in the sunlight. Just as goodness

I found a lengthy word with a non-Russian ending,
unwittingly, inside a children’s storybook,
and turned away from it with a strange kind of shudder.

Night after night he walks the Paris he knew.
Searches out each place. Hotel Duc de Bourgoin
on Ile Saint Louis, the primitive room