Beasts
At the threshold
Rats

The ivory wedding hat came tumbling down—
how long had it been stored away, untouched
like desire repressed and bound—

         And nothing we could ever lose
spreads over the white ground.
         Soft ellipses of footprints lead
   into the trees—

It could feel good to stare at numbers 
all day, another job but I can’t name any; 

He cakes night as a kind of medicine,
swallowing it with a buck and shiver.
Sometimes a drowning muse come from within

        Is she dead?

 Yes, she is dead.

             Did you forgive her?

Neither an invalid aunt who had been asked to care for a
                                                                                              sister’s
little girl, to fill the dead sister’s place, nor the child herself

To all those driven berserk or humanized by love
this is offered, for I need help
deciphering my dream.

. . . telling those who swarm around him his desire
is that an appendage from each of them
fill, invade each of his orifices, —

The sun allows you to see only what the sun
falls
upon: the surface. What we wanted was what was elsewhere: cause.

                        *

Or some books say that’s what we once wanted. Prophets of
cause
never, of course, agreed about cause, the uncaused cause: or they

                        *

terribly did. Asleep, I struggle to stay inside sleep, unravaged by
heart-
piercing dreams—craving, wish, desire to remain inside, if briefly,

                        *

obliteration. I cleave to the voice of Poppea’s nurse:
oblivion
soave.

                        *

Not frightening, the word
oblivion
as Oralia Domínguez, hauntingly clinging to the sound, in 1964 sings it.