Some waves came up overnight, though in Norderney, there was no weather.
At the commercial wharf, a thin stream of white exhaust rose vertically from the ferry.
The first service would depart soon. The puddles lay dark in the stone streets

April 2020

When I came to—crocuses were pushing up
purple in my garden, return of the cooing dove—

and when I got out at Penn Station there were no faces
along the tracks—

wind blew through 32nd Street with a faint whiff of onions
and hair spray

Plugging in the portable heater and pulling it toward my legs I remembered
The braziers under the round table at the finca you brought us to
In the Spanish hills. It was January, a searingly cold afternoon, and in a cave-like room

A musician tumbles bicycle handlebars
  on a sidewalk and makes jangling music;
a gardener prunes branches, then shakes
  the Japanese maple to drop a few

Take this pic—take this
newly minted plaque.

For plaque, read empire. Say—puff puff
pass. Say—Baba, please. Zip up. You and your dirty

One hundred and eighty-two pages spreads her story like disease.
They send me one false daughter—Dracula—
and then carefully erase the scene.

        She’s been erected out of thin air—with the thin air of money.
In Konya—I scream—in Ulus—I embrace her—
while these papers spread her story like disease.

What remains of you beloved

                                        to haunt Self
like the tangled script of an ancient king
                speaking
across time

Dr. Redacted will tell me not to tell you
this, like this,
in a poem: how it’s all right, love, that we don’t love
living.

We look at the map. When we arrive in France from King’s Cross the fields are striated with barbed wire and it is raining.

After I make my home dark
I wander through the few
quiet rooms and let
the bright blinking eyes
of the continuing electricity