The things that abandon you get remembered different.
As precise as the English language can be, with words
like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination
of sounds that describes only that leaving. Once,
drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if
I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have
dismissed him in the way that the youth dismiss it all:

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, —