When I enter the cemetery
of San Felice a Ema
I have to go past many tombstones

Winter trees cough like old men
about death’s white nightmares
while the rain talks in Latin.

   Waking in silence and, through tilted blinds,
the mark of red bougainvillea—pink light tossed
         at a white door. Out of sleep, I turn

A man in a mask and wearing a fat tank on his back is bent to the door of the
          parking garage.
He is spraying and wiping, wiping and spraying. Another man with no mask
          and no hair shuffle-dances around him,
gives a wave, crosses the street, tries to open the door to the hotel, which is
          locked and closed, darkened for good:

Out of the darkness, men come 
     with knives. They work quickly, 
muttering back and forth. 

It was white I wanted —of snow, clouds, of sky overcast, of
       a star if you take the shine from it. Usual
           sound, light, and I wake—but sense a shift

Ava taught me how to smoke
in the woods behind our high-school dorm. 
We lay back laughing in the dirt.

I know Grace
who speaks to fire.
She tells this on herself

She was older, sleek, and had a bite to her, but I was bolder with my knees on either side of her.

My father naked in the photo, young
again, crouched among rocks and water. It's an island,
a time so long ago he is thin,