Thinking to have their fun, those boys 
set a match to the kerosene-soaked 
rabbit 

Only his old dog recognized him when, 
after twenty years,
Odysseus returned to Ithaka.

How they tumbled down the snow-filled streets,

how they slept in battered vending boxes
and hung from dowels in the public library.

How my father kept the memorable ones in his closet,
among the dying shoes.

Then the power went out. The TV closed its eye

and the house felt strange in the new silence:
a hush of snowstorm.

A poem in translation, 
                the young man was fond of saying,
is like the dead body of a foreigner

Straw promise to vowel, up then why or be
forward on bind,
advent kind rested fare so

Straw promise to vowel, up then why or be
forward on bind,
advent kind rested fare so

At your center: 
spectacles to sharpen sight,
wake of two white birds’ liftoff,

It’s that feeling again:
pinecone going
wristbone, phone, eye

Cups and swords the prophet fed from, led with,
and an inlaid box with a hair from his holy beard,
all wrought with gold and strewn with jewels like fistfuls

The strong horseshoe shape of a horse’s mouth
Of his teeth, set that way of a suitcase handle

And the way a bit, in just that way, pulls him: