I was the father of two
Young children when I started
Plans for a long walk that became

Instead of flowers and annuals in livid snow a forest
of nameplates: Ammobium alatum
(everlasting), Myosotis (forget-me-not),

There’s good fear, fear can be
good when you’re keeping a family
of Jews in the closet or under

Sadomasochistic rain in Leipzig. It slaps the sidewalks.
It sticks its fingers down their drains. It relieves itself
in the city center, then washes away the evidence, so that

When I’m writing a poem,
there’s less and less of it.

As I approach the mountains,

Sometimes I prefer not to untangle it.
I prefer it to remain disorganized,

because it is richer that way,

The shelves are ugly and next to them is a garbage chute leading God knows where. Entire pallet loads get dumped in there: 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, as boxes wind up on the charity van, back in the world. Some of it is shredded; some is crisp—laundered once, folded, never worn.

Tartarus’s footless offspring who spray fans of glyphosate
    mixed with Styx water over farmland regularly,
technicians of os agrotóxicos for cash, I am weaponless

The ruin we made of our garden
Is confusing even today.
Seven trees times three

It was a year of pirates in speedboats,
anonymous bullies spreading privacies
on the Internet, and the worst of them