riding in the pick-up
between the father and the son
I hardly know the older

Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Jaurès
dies in a wine-puddle. Who or what stares
through the café-window créped in powder-smoke?

Fantastic to be Lowry by proxy,
Confabulating him; to stand tongue-tied
In awe of yourself; to hold epoxy-

Knowing the dead, and how some are disposed, 
Subdued under rubble, water, sand-graves, 
In clenched cinders, not yielding their abused 

His coughing woke him, wrecked him (or his father’s

hammer did) and broke the spell like molten iron

I stand before this landscape at dusk
   jacklighted, caught in the high beams,
shocked into stillness, rapt, incapable

The grinder says a freak is either born
or made. But he is paid to lie. The congress
I have known is complicated: that pickled

2. The Room in Which an Orange Is the Only Light

… the moon comes up in her
secondness, left edge not
filled in quite, the abject not filled in quite
    but trying …

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