The shape of loneliness is a hole
By definition, to be filled.

At the outer edges of the hole
The lizard of jealousy sits

Sometimes, on evenings like this, my mother will speak of Tom Scott,
going down to a place inside her beyond the river’s high reach,
to a place where grief has no pallbearer except the river;

I saw it in a book on diseases of the mouth,
the smile that is heaven, the smile I cannot reach:
the youth known only by some gesture in the street

All day, we loitered at the throat of the penny arcade
to hear how the fisherman’s cast had taken the eye of Vilas
Puchomsky, a pain radiating down to the sexual curve.

All summer, I watched them
make their ghostly caduceus through water—

fleeting, heraldic—

A time comes of silence and secret Sargassos,
the desolation of tourists and billboards,
a time of seamless ennui:

Seated towards the rear, facing backwards, smoking
in the cool day, he briskly turned his head

toward the stranger, who jumped onto the moving
streetcar, one hand holding her skirt up and

 

Those were the polio years. The war
Prospered. In Warm Springs Georgia
Strong-armed Sister Kenny

Because there are things we don’t understand, we’re shaking
our heads no. But still there are acupuncture needles,
mysterious as Excalibur, in a numb chest,

There are so many domains. And Julie doesn’t know it
yet, but she’s traveling through time at a ferocious rate.