The gravestone-looking slab donated to the college
for instructing students about light and dark
and the rotation of the world stands solemnly

The coat of Italian red eyes me. Wool
Unraveling from abuse,
Creased and spent at the armpits.

If you find me nocturnal and flawed
Look again. Because tonight
I looked at me as though you were looking.

It’s time to leave again. She unplugs the fridge
and watches until the orange coils on its back
have faded down to gray. She turns off the gas.
She papers the windows in layers from the outside,
because if she doesn’t, the moon will reflect in the panes
like a lamp in every room. And then the house will still
seem lived in. And then how to move on?
The last thing she does, always, is go with them
one by one into their rooms and hold them up
to pluck the glow-in-the-dark stars from the ceiling.

The obverse of the sanguinary Turkey
Carpet I figured I was looking for‚
Festooned with geometric shapes in murky

Cursed be the day the gilded youth of Greece
Aboard the Argo sought the golden fleece!
When we in Colchis saw this foreign ship

The nymph whom Paris swears he never knew
From lofty Ida sends these scribbled few
Words to him to whom she still is true.

She shapes the moral traveller 
A sphere where she is in command, 
And on a lower level her 

Time's one-way traffic won't reverse
Summer's sentimental course
Or force the headlong universe

They broke into houses,
my sisters. The empty ones,
just built, where nobody had yet
tried to sleep. Little mounds
of sawdust still in the corners,
no floorboards loose.