Crater of the beginning, mud of death,
endless wreckage,
is this your world,
the serpent you forged
over seven long nights?

When Archie told me the incredible story
of Lady Margaret’s piano, an Obermeier plucked
from a forgotten warehouse in bombed-out Berlin,
then secretly carted off, scarfed up by the Allies
and loaded onto a plane, delivered to Ireland

My grandmother had eight children,
one of them twice.

The first Olga lived
a mere month,

succeeded by my mother,
the second Olga,

A ginkgo leaf like a splayed ass

A begonia leaf is a pebbled surface
          green and burgundy

A long and narrow leaf curls down

All the different methods
          of extending yourself so the sun
          might better touch you

Serrated edges of the teardrop
          nettle leaves

sting your fingers

The nursery labels everything
          and so assigns appearances
          to names I only know from fiction

Once, in a room no bigger than the bed, 
I made love with a girl.

                                                *

Have you ever made love with a girl?   
Once I hadn’t, then I had.

I am named in my mother’s trust 
but no one knows how to find her land. 

Bounded to the north by the Southern Pacific Railroad, 
east by the heirs of Dugas, Robichaux,
west by a gravel road.

How much of this do I own? 

Not frequent, the monitors of doomed pastoral
admit these native moths their autumn rising

after a sleepy eviscerated summer, stubble
suddenly alive with beakiness, and then and then . . .

Either they just die
or they get sick and die of the sickness
or they get sick, recover, then die of something else,
or they get sick, appear to recover,
then die of the same thing,
the sickness coming back 
to take another bite out of you
in the forest of your final hours.

Over, the kite’s flight; and of a sudden
is the realization of the morning overcome
by the echo of dark nights, silent witness
to the colorlessness crouching down before us.
Stealing time is what’s been happening all the time.
Is it because you’ve heard only your own cries,
fifty years earlier, too, as they went by, adulterated with death?
Or some shy, crumpled laughter carrying with it
the air of an unspoken but certain defeat?

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