Whatever comes to pass: the devastated world
sinks back into twilight,
the forest offers it a sleeping potion,

Under the olive trees the light pours out its seeds, 
poppies appear and begin to flicker, 
burning the oil that feeds their fire; 

Our field is the sky,
tilled by the sweat of motors,
in the face of night,

Concoct the stories of your own life.
The masks and costumes assumed from infancy.
Make up the true things as well as the lies.

 My mother shrugged off life
Three thousand miles from Paris,
City of her birth. It takes

1.

Dawn was their greeting time.

Such pleasure one needs to make for oneself—.
She has snipped the paltry forsythia
to force the bloom, has cut each stem on the

my neighbors 
say, when what they mean 

What makes Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
so hard to put down is his wild branching rhetoric.
It’s not enough to trace pathologies of mind, whatever

Not smoke but the shades of smoke, and not cloud-work
but the gray and smoke-green densities of clouds—
if he were sure their voices would carry through