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

Watch out for power
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

On the Irish coast, a rutted road
traced a winding track along the wind-
scored face of a limestone bluff.

Perhaps the earth is floating,
I do not know.
Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups

From the sea came a hand,
ignorant as a penny,
troubled with the salt of its mother,

At my wedding, my father, ten years dead,
practices what Isaac Babel called
         the "genre of silence"—that is,

Naomi said, Go home girls, I'm cursed,

and we clutched, cried No! No!
the proper length of time. Then

have never known starvation nor plenitude
and unless the order of the world 
changes, I won’t.