The last words the sea spoke
before it died, the last sigh
of the great wind that blew

Between the freeway
               and the gray conning towers
of the ballpark, miles

We planted it in May of thirty-three.
Strange times for us. How could a child explain
The helpless eagle on the ice-box door,

They love me.
Each morning they fill the strongbox
in my chest with grass
and salt pellets—I have good hallucinations.

One boy was hard-of-hearing,
red-haired, freckled, never smiled,
another wore a white bib,

You would have to go down
into black earth like my father
gold light against shadow

Belle. As a boy of eight he thought of a bell,
something that rang, like the little crystal bell
on the antique table beside the bed that Mother

Eighteen years ago my cousin Arthur
   died alone in a hotel
         in Perugia,

The Doctor fingers my bruise. 
“Magnificent,” he says, “black 
at the edges and purple 

Someone enters your life
on a day you no longer
remember. The years pass,