If she faints while in her fast, the chef awaits
her word in a kitchen hidden at the heart
of the hotel. Her hunger, his counterpart,

It need not be a desiccated wreck 
of boards, completely uninhabited, 
adobe bricks regressed to mud, hay. Heck,

Any tree would seem to grieve,
what with the hawk lonelinessing
on her desiccated perch.

Always already, the word within the world.
So the spider spins the same web each morning
and you are born into meaning

who came whirling out of the North 
like a locust-swarm, storm-darkening the sky, 
their long hair whipping in the wind like the manes of horses, 

They won’t come to you. These nights, you could sit for a year
on the dock behind Arthur’s Gift Shop and General Store
before you’d spot with your flashlight

Possible to believe in a bearable sort of life
in a white room in one of the tidy anonymous streets
that flash by the elevated subway. Picture it:

The beautiful gray dog
loping across the lawn
all afternoon for the sheer

Every night they went a little farther.
Restless, too hot to sleep
under the too-bright quilts she had made as a girl

When you set out to find your Northwest Passage
and cross to an empty region of the map

with a passionate desire to know what lies beyond,