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

Tomás Luis de Victoria
moves very slow
in his motet

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

Am not sure what it is
In oceanography
how the tide just tears apart

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

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