Chalice in the right hand. Bleached
handkerchief in the left. Still there are those
who never touch the lip. Dippers we call them, their wafers

From a sky sand-brushed and blurring, rain.
Plants on the sill heave signs of loneliness.
The lamp glows, a pendulous jewel hung

My Hamlet pulls his yes through an architecture of yeses
though it might appear that he merely negates,
sitting in the dark after murder,

Widowers have more dignity.

The flames starting from the ears.

That’s what I say: it’s worth a try.

Meet me, meet me whisper the waters from the train
    window and the small
      skiff adrift

For some of us the only way of knowing we are here at all, going
across and going down,
exquisitely temporal though at no point believable; fragile; tragic.

  When I caught sight of them, the secret lovers,
I had been watching the pink-edged white blossoms
  in the garden below

Black bars expanding
      over an atomic-yellow ground — feelers retracted —
the monarch lay flat on the street

Then two juncoes trapped in the house this morning.
  The house like a head with nothing inside.
The voice says: come in.

Not until I learned how to transform my childhood dreams into tomorrow’s crust of bread did I become truly successful at begging. Now I’m able to pick and choose, and there are only a few select areas I’ll work. Of primary importance is the presence of an electrical outlet.