They are not, as you might suppose, modelled on maple
          leaves

With Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude
Debussy turned to sleeping figures:
the garden was growing cold, its trees

He's never seen these stars before
and tumbles headfirst down
the castle's rumpled courtyard stairs.

The dandelion was hidden
That day in June
When the moon eclipsed the prairie

And the stone edifice stood perfectly still—
Like the parents of that imbecile, shocked
By the ingenuity it showed in its own destruction.

The list of small deformities passed unrecorded
In the stupor of heredity,
Like our weather,

Lost causes confound. Where are you, cousin, 
since you swung upside down the iron gate
outside school? The earth is your sky—correct 

hammock me in the graveyard alone under the flowering noni tree grandmother me blown-turned leaves

Tremor in his hands. He turns obsolete
leaves edged with thunder since the opening scene.
What he sees he reads under croton shade,
out in the sun.

                                                Quite a row of them sitting there
                                                Quite a row of them sitting there 
Evangelical Sundays. Church hats,