In 1981 
          in a hotel gift shop outside Phoenix, AZ, 
a little girl stood by the postcard rack, turning it gently. 

How much the colonel loved his granddaughters
you will never know.
                           Their laughter filled his black Mercedes

The dogs tipped the garbage and the meat spilled out
the larger dog sniffed it
the smaller stood to the side and growled

the meat quivered on the floor
I’d kept it too long it was
slick and fat it had expired

all this while I stood in line
and then the ballot machine glowed greenly
yes yes yes I told it

while the large dog licked the meat
lifted it gingerly with its mouth
dropped it wetly to the floor

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

Do relent so do borrow for, ever infringe you
whether allow close up in redempt so. For do
to give over why for cue rested, for done along

To the or so then for all for on, both for
these an or then, down as before in fond and

Straw promise to vowel, up then why or be
forward on bind,