The elation of naming, that dispassionate
stance, of course it could not last. As all

first steps it was bound to lead to that first

Then the old paragon rose and spoke: “Until this week we had the luxury of playing with language. Now, everything is suddenly the same. We must use words, my compañeros, to construct towering forms, juggernauts of play. We must dismantle the family—you know which one—using these edifices. Only then will our children’s earnings and our

well-muscled young men be safe. Until this week we could play in the fields of bombs. Now we crenellate or die.” Thus he spoke, and thus the initialed generals responded: “Under

We stay in the apartment of a Croatian couple, husband and wife, both in love with our friend M.

We could be each other’s great tragedies had the world not slaked us already.

This is for you
Now that your curved wood chair
like a chair carved in Black Woods, Germany,

Mortared by macerated wood-pulp effluvium,
                                 a paper palace hangs.

The young queen spun her eggs and hatched her grunts.

 

In a public park, fringed by wilderness.
No marker there, no sense of what occupied space—
the invisible drift that caused my heart to break.

Where in heaven have you been?
Wreathed waif, pale grace,
Scandalous would-be.

I breathed on the glass
of my other lives 
so I could write in the fog.

For makers of elaborated worlds, adorned and peopled by the creatures and the furniture of their inventions. For those who live as if the way things are were not enough and mean, by their words, to do something about it. For those who would protect the first beloved from the fresh reality of the second. For fabricators of plausible excuses that will save