On her way to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Sister Mary Aloysius 
Drove past many signs: Earthworms Here. Have Many Rabbit. Calicos 
In Burlap Sacks for Free. There were wooden crosses, some upsided

You like leafing through biographies
There you’re in another life
How strange, how startling

My favorite poets
never met
They lived in different countries

Kraków was overcast that morning, the hills steamed.
It was raining in Munich, in valleys the Alps
lay hidden and heavy as stones.

                                                Quite a row of them sitting there
                                                Quite a row of them sitting there 
Evangelical Sundays. Church hats, 

                So here I go in the famous Spanish slowness.
Clouds advance in their relentless armada—
(Thornton Wilder once said it takes a year 

                 A few months back, we went down to Huelva 
to clean our graveyard—condoms hung 
from the saplings shooting up from the dead: 

                The bishop named his turtle Tortuga.
An austere choice, but the bishop is austere:
he wears old stained trousers and lives in the dark

Nothing in the nothing before dawn
but the bent screak of a crow,
hedges long naked of birds.

 I had left my passport at an inn we stayed at for a night or so whose name I couldn’t remember. This is how it began. The next hotel would not receive me. A beautiful hotel, in an orange grove, with a view of the sea.