It's Papa's coat she's wrapped in,
his old wool Lodenmantel, like a child

wrapped in a blanket of green leaves,

Summer afternoon, Henry James said,
the most beautiful words in the language.
I wonder if he saw those summer afternoons

Theirs is a heroic lot, cast away
and glistening so silently among the rubbish.
There are so many secret places

The Japanese say the size of a man's ear
will determine his wealth:
a large ear like the Buddha's

I am custodian of close things.
Even winter trees have blurred
To leaf, and faces come upon me

Grouped in the dusk at the station, blameless
and undaunted behind the burn of one shared cigarette,
this circle of children, their wronged can of animate garbage,

The bodies line this lake of suicides.
I visit the locked shed
Where lovers carve their summer oaths. Inside

The apples are early this year, & the grass is late. The taxi is
Early & the past is late. The fist is late. The tooth—like the news

Of the tooth—broke both early & late. I’m telling you: this all
Really happened. I had a love I ripped through like it was bread.

I had bread & cheese, apples & sugar on my every plate.
A sugar rose on my every cake. A love like a water

The little candles which dot the rosette-bedecked
Sheetcake sway so demurely that the happy
Huffing and puffing comes as a cosmic surprise,

It was a summer for sitting naked in
The backyard, the deep drizzle deploying the young
As an aspect of the lately-discovered elemental.