The shrouded figure struggling to break from the coffin;
The sea giving out muffled cries by night;
The black hose damning the wild river.

Where the stone foaress shoulders the leaning city,
where vacant windows front cracked rooftiles, dislodged
   stones,

He comes to Egypt with the Crusaders. Of all the men
at the inn I'm drawn to him. Is it his eyes?
I ask with mine. He smiles and nods consent.

The best footman’s good
at sweeping up your broken glass,
has a tear for every occasion, knows

They are so busy and self-involved as I hear them muttering in the distance
that they strike me sometimes as sheer marvels:
the dishwasher filling its huge blue gullet—a cluck from the timer,

Black caterpillars squirmed under noses.
Spit curls wormed down from hairlines.

On the cold coast west out of Hoquiam
I’m a stalker with a short-handled gun,

Blood flares from the nostrils.
The lungs, the enormous watermelon bellows,
are lined with it.
Legs conduits,

What comes more easily now
than writing to the dead?
To look back at the body

On May 11th, 1943, my father, terminal,
hugged me at home in a New York blackout
and kissed me in his bathrobe goodbye forever