On the morning that lasts forever
the neighbors are playing a tape of Tibetan
monks again, somewhere between groaning

at Delphi. Some judgment! Now I've got osteonecrosis,

talk about the dead speaking through us.
The fountainhead cut off the flow to the corpus,

He winds through the party like wind, one of the just
who live alone in black and white, bewildered

Can't move can't speak can't think to wonder
why that's so. Song says I still
believe, can't think of what, who

The hulks lie on their sides amid the breakers,
the wrecks of mischance rot. I could lose myself
in riddled waves: sailors drown daily there.

Midsummer with other men's lovers, fumbles
on a living room couch, significance asleep
upstairs: I come through the door, I come

In the painting by Guido Reni of Saint Sebastian
in the Palazzo Rosso, which reproduction makes available
to those who travel only on the page, the saint to be

They are my parents.
Both are walking toward me,
she on the left with a mud caked
wooden box in her hand propped

“Do you realize,” I asked, after biting the sensitive
Spot on her shoulder, “that Darius was incited
To attack the Greeks by a homesick physician in his court?”

Riding from the capital to my home in New York, I noticed that autumn was still intense here in the south and I thought to write a poem, a posteriori, that would, by its rhythms transmit the rush and transition of the season, but full of regrets for not having been able on my trip to formulate or remember answers to certain questions that had been put to me about myself and my work, I am attacked by anxiety that the placid beauty of leaves changing color out the window of the train cannot alleviate.