Some parents shy away from the body,
but we hush up about the cross—
rereading our daughter the story about Jesus

I was the poolboy but it was billiards
I got up on the table with a feather duster
and did a little dance like the honeybee

Roxy lifts her furrowed face and opens
her mouth for another hunk of banana muffin.
Her eyes are matted shut; her white hair wild as Isaiah’s.

That year, sea-fog in tufted hanks
spun through the eucalyptus tops
below our attic flat,

Each evening now the ash blue flame
swept from my fingertips
climbing its gas ladder up the flue

impossible to pick it up. the oily outer coating catches on the kitchen
counter and begs to grow, even where there’s no soil, the ones I did
manage to plant lived for three years—never trees, but the flat leaves

Yellow infers from itself papayas and their pulp,
penetrable yellow.
At noon: bees, sweet stinger and honey.

Jesus’s passion is purple and white,
very close to joy.
Purple is tart, it will ripen.

We are a nice family.

My sister Brindille, the first-born, used to be married. She had an hourglass which indicated the time when the water of the ocean would reach a secret point on the hill. 

Fifteen or twenty more dollars a night,
They could enact this solemn start
On the Grand Canal, if just in a garret