There’s a box for her femur and pelvis,
and one more for her ankles and vertebrae.

Monuments: They arrest the eye
like these twin tongues of ruddy stone
adorning Basel’s riverside.

Again this first fall weekend our children dance
(There is little dancing here without our dancers.)
They’ve returned to college, adding to the distance.

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

Her body, first found dead, teeming with pills,
was quite alive actually.

It’s true the shop man had slim fingers

but hers were slimmer, florid and ancient
in their urge to find places, curious places

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

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