Cast them my way,
Groundless and true.

Eternal both.

 

God appeared to Dante as a cloud.
Dante had been lying on the ground

like a clod, compressed

On a street in a city a thousand miles inland
a woman I'd never met grabbed me by the shoulders
and shook me and shook me and shouted

Writing becomes distant and portraits of hosts crowd the space. The next page becomes as cornered and concerned as a studied artifact. Thoughts not towards anything but embodying a lot of writing. Too many military wives are being arrested. The tiny bit of wandering summarized by a spartan attitude of space.

Among the things that we don't know
about their civilization is the name by which

they called a clay plate such as this, that is

 

The logic of sleep draws me closer and closer to you,
taking the names of everything from me. My desire
to speak is suspended, my old reverence

The beds are always made, and bright hallways
veer off like lanes, looking for canals to leap
across in a white arch, and the stairs rise

The sun is fierce over the slum of Kibera
and the iron roofs wrinkle into eyelids
sleepily tilting over damp mud walls.

I was sick, more or less, for the whole trip,
and so she got to know the pharmacists
of Venice, claiming it would help to sip

My mother wants to see me again. That means she'd like me
   to shave off my beard.
She points her thumb at the dark portrait of a bearded man,