And here I am wondering about a simple hesitation in  your ankles,
an unruly lock, a cracked note.
I explore your landscapes—estranged bride,

I am convinced that if I died she would be really annoyed. So when I realized this—that die “real” is actual and potential —I could swing both bodies at once. And one morning on the broad avenue I did and she was there. Her reaction—whirrr clikk—pure nonchalance, walking along as if she were totally somewhere else holding hands with a moth. The sheerest nerve can catch die smallest thought. Read on and learn why.

She was not so sweet as you would think.
Not in the damp of her hair, not in the joint of her bones.
This you can believe:

As if it’s important that summer remain 
here on the river’s bank, the tree sheds 
its fainter leaves: mauve

In their distorting internal mirrors,
the battered and in pain
become the dragons mauling them.

That was a pretty roundabout answer to what
I would have to say
was one of the more straightforward of my questions.

As soon as he realized he was lost, that
in kicking around his new job in his head,
the new people he'd met, and how

Another feast day, and the bells are ringing.
The bells are ringing, and not more
than a handful of versts from here,

I think of the old pipes,
how everything white
in my house is rust-stained

Far above the malleable half-rib floater,
a sudden unexpected pain

skitters where the skin curve of the fifth rib