When I am 12,000 miles from her
she will take her head
and throw it off a cliff. 

Winsome Bob meets Katherine & drops Nancy.
Nancy burrows even deeper
into her studies of semiology, at Yale.

‘The land is holy’ was as close as you came
to ‘Melancholy’. It changed you at the beach, Eddie -

In the ninth grade I met a fantastic number of times
with Cookie Harris in the woods . . . Under the pretense
of going over our Algebra notes, given the pressure

The night was to the bowler
as pig is to the ham—

The apple-stars have gently dropped to earth
And settled in the trees, stars you can taste

Laid out in detail in the tree,
The soul glittering for a while in a green body

                The bishop named his turtle Tortuga.
An austere choice, but the bishop is austere:
he wears old stained trousers and lives in the dark

                So here I go in the famous Spanish slowness.
Clouds advance in their relentless armada—
(Thornton Wilder once said it takes a year 

                 A few months back, we went down to Huelva 
to clean our graveyard—condoms hung 
from the saplings shooting up from the dead: