It began with the deer, dead in the water 
Just off my parents’ dock, 
And then there was a procession of horses,

As in the plays, the body was decor,
Fit embellishment to a scene
Where chance's misrule seemed to have gone as planned:

Yes, I want someone to know me well,
better than the foreman at Ford Electra
knows the chips

Up the hill the motorcycle climbs, its sound
near now, entering the dream
and the girl’s hair flares

Estas brutal, someone says about the heat or the boricua 
walking down the street with a dulce de leche. My sister shivers. 
I paraphrase a fever when I mount the stairs to the roof to swelter

On the pale morning I left town
I was thinking about women,
and later, in the Rockies where work was scarce,

I fell in love with the Siberian Iris
In the garden catalog,
Slender-stemmed, indigo shading to violet,

I don’t know what to say to you
and have called you names—mutilator of souls, 
warden of dust, evocateur— that only placed me

The troubled entrepreneurs of evening—
the palm-readers, the Mexican bracelet salesmen,
the girl who dances on a sheet of tin—

I went down to Missolonihgi
with my oldest friend—this was a long time ago—
and we visited Byron’s house,