I finger this vagabond cloth to numbness.
I can't even capture your hands
or what carries us limb by limb.

Better give me something to smoke
If I'm going to love you, better

Take what once was so hard to give up

Ladies, it is late. The lake is ice.
You've surely seen the heron fly beyond
the great black oak. And watched the robins go,

                                  We all came down with it
in the seventeenth century, back

                                  when it was still possible
to die.

Nothing prepared me for your absence,
except, perhaps, the wind rattling stalks of autumn corn.

My world is always on the verge of silence,

I know I scared you last night by shaking,
the only time you were forced to share
a dream that seemed so bad upon waking.

   All this gold and silver for her to have
a sitter's fifty-minute hour go on
   past lunch. Stomach mewing. Saffron shafts

Damned fool to make a hash of it like that.
Is this what comes from wanting to make art
out of the Middle East's sunbaked back streets?

She cannot get it to her mouth fast enough. She cannot
   stop herself.
What rush correspondence of blood replenishes dangerous

Nothing of the son occurred, of course,
not the evil dreams, not the dementia,
neither bovine diet nor bestial appearance,