All Saints’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set
On a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin under the weather,
Warm still for November. Night and day it gapes

You could feel a passion for invisibility: to be a fly on the wall,
the pitcher's ear, the child in the corner
with his eyes closed: you could grow fat on that, full of years.

     I can feel each cloud as a thing
and seem to touch its turrets and to think
           the great curve of its birth

The river ripples in the sun
women and men come and are gone

in back of light, night—anew the undoing
evening in us ending a day of dying

Righted, they would form
a somnambulistic stance in the
stoop-shouldered dark; shuffling
in the absence of skin stretched

I can bang at the lyre, but make it sing?
Each time the muse whistles through my spine,
she numbs like a drug, and I nod

Weeks after her death I came to the garden window
to marvel at sudden pale feathers catching, scattering
past the rainy glass. I looked for magic everywhere.
Signs from the afterlife that I was, indeed, distinct.

Molds are made, two figures cast,
their plaster bodies glistening and since
light across a modulated surface

The cornfields didn’t covet buttons yet;
No ghost crouched in the cedar chest,