Once, in a room no bigger than the bed, 
I made love with a girl.

                                                *

Have you ever made love with a girl?   
Once I hadn’t, then I had.

Of the vastness of clouds
We knew nothing;
We slept in houses underground.

I was so young that I invented loss,
The image of the mother's face receding
On the far edge of the broken bed,

The romance of the twelve-year-old who finds
Himself behind the school in a stingray,
How he's never the same. I had a friend

Take Antoine Guillemet instead.
  When he was following that dirty gang
    I thought we lost him. Blinding poppies,

Snow, rocks darker than any shadow in the world.
We glimpsed another life below us—cottages, goats—

But never imagined it would be so difficult.

I’ve followed the crumbs to your feast,
share the table with Father again,
his anger smoldering belly-deep

Had I glanced from buttering my toast
a moment before, would my heart
have been riven by the fierce thrust

No, it isn’t the birds
covered with ash,
no, it isn’t the cries beating against the windows of the wedding,

That road
got no people.
That road.