Two ospreys stir the branches over our heads
And circle the wide water. Cormorants,
The year’s first mackerel running in the weeds.

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

Everything we've heard of heaven is true:
Italian landscape hazy with the blush
That varnish takes above an egg-wash smear.

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

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.

Two vases of flowers squarely on the ledge
stare out as though they regret the countryside,
mean to ignore you squinting above the edge

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

The genuine pain that keeps everything awake
is a tiny, infinite burn
on the innocent eyes of other systems.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there.