The underworld the bright brochures have shown
declines our courtesy. The rare albino fish
wait in the falls, and the blind salamanders,
ignoring camera flashes, sulk in cracks.

You must be dead at least ten years.
You must have lived an unremarkable life
before that: a teacher, say, of unremarkable

Where were you, nymphs,
when I was learning to apply
the proper plaster of Paris and papier-mâché

Facing wisteria, his eyesight dim,
Monet painted a footbridge over a pond,
dawn, noon, sundown. Seeing only blue,

I cannot change them,
I am told by you people
who apply the rule of leopards

Hidden, wrinkled as a flush violet wedged
Humbly amid the moss, it breathes
Still wet with love that leaves

Adam and Eve preferred the Tree of Good
and Evil to the fruits of infinity,
says Edward Dahlberg. Gustav Janouch observes

I am haunted by the names
of foreign places: Lvov and its bells;
Galway with its shimmer of green;

We open on a mystery,
a riddle has happened, will happen, will happen again.

What’s the point of experience

When hunting, an Inuit man makes an igloo a day. Some of them have ice windows.

Once a day he walks away from the snow house by the snow hill.

An Inuit elder who saw an airplane says, It was talked about for a long time. It was constantly talked about as something that looked like a loon that