I could love the pine tree,
and the road going back and forth like a blue thread,

Come with me to Stanley’s and spend your life
weeping in the small park on 106th Street.

wishing, this time, they could sail through the sky like
    horses,

you have to be ready for it to start sprouting in your hands;
you have to stick it in the ground like a piece of willow;

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember
what it was like in the spring of 1950
before the burning coal entered my life.

I slept sometimes for thirty or forty minutes
while the violins shrieked and the cellos trembled.

What life
after the photograph
of the granddaughters

goodbye to the sun 
my father 
who blessed me 

At the age of three
I was promised in marriage
to a neighboring princess

—one finger chiromantic exercise—

It sums our vital force and our will.
Cowards had theirs sliced and in Sparta