My voice then quietly intoned:
Let me be transfigured.
Let me know the opulence of night.

Nothing melodramatic, it’s just when the sunlight
came in through the wired windows and laid itself
down on the green floor, it was nice, we liked it
there, then, playing our games. And like kids

I dreamt my love was lost, uncomforted.
He lay alone in Pavia, eclipsed
by fortune, by the catastrophic tides

Her body, first found dead, teeming with pills,
was quite alive actually.
Left to itself, it made gurgling commands

Bright scab of track.
Bright stitch each train
rips out. In negative
 
degrees, metal cowers
as if a god had threatened
to curse it,

Plugging in the portable heater and pulling it toward my legs I remembered
The braziers under the round table at the finca you brought us to
In the Spanish hills. It was January, a searingly cold afternoon, and in a cave-like room

Is there a secret map of the lives of men
In the slow drift of stars and clouds of stars?
Can I build a house out of hydrogen

This vast meandering flat-bottomed gully
much smaller than a valley, with a hump
of rock spined all its length is home to—what,

The guinea hen of Manalapan
has a wattle like a turkey, but cut short.
Her feathers have spots like streaked paint.

Horses with wings and horses with shoes.
White stallions sacrificed to Roman gods.
Scythian kings buried with fifty horses.