Children’s fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse.

There are country roads now that are empty.
They’ll hold on to the light of the day

When the National Library burned for three days in August,
the town was choked with snow. Those days I could not find
a single pencil in the house, and even when I grabbed one

We were inmates of an orphanage in Kraków;
A prison in Panama;
A school for the blind in Genoa.

O light, unsayable in your splendor.
A lot of good you did to me.

Bald man smoking in bed,
Naked lightbulb over his head,
The shadow of his cigar 

the fundamental equation
of an empty street
in a rundown neighborhood

Stalin was killing off his fellow revolutionaries,
The first Dairy Queen opened in Kankakee, Ill.,
As I lay in my crib peeing in my diapers.

You’ve been paying visits
To that hunchbacked tailor
In his long-torn-down shop,

What I hate are short winter days,
Cold and snowless afternoons,