When the high-pitched sounds of the August continuo
circulated like breezes through the immovable heat,
time was a single leaf drifting upwards, then down.

There is a tree falling in our back lot,
a willow, gigantic and scarred, with torn limbs
hanging at oblique angles, its base a tangle

The photograph blanches then recedes then fizzes, like soda on a stain.

Everything is red. The trees look like they’re bending over. The lorry is approaching the village. Nurpur. Don’t tell anyone it was Nurpur. Just say it was any old village.

And afterwards, the sea befriended us,
gave away its fish. It drank its own
deep cup and did not pour the fishers down

Yesterday the ocean opened its minatory door
         and suggested that the land, from South Carolina
         to New England, had best come inside.

  The sun beats down as if it were in a frenzy over broken promises. The heat of the concrete and walls seems as if it would begin to howl like Sioux with rifles sold by the bad white men. You drop into your chair like a good man who is deciding what to do next. The Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific drift by your mind's eye. O, daydreams!

As Lorna falls across Freddy, and Bernadette,
who grew up in a rainy village of one factory
in upper New York, a schoolgirl toed and twisted

This is how I began: a delicacy
to my mother, a scallop rocking in
her shell, one in thousands of my father’s spawn.

always
to someone
for the first