The Empire’s train rolls west from Pressburg’s heights;
I fall from sleep to sleep, dreaming of clearwings,
thousands, flying over father’s meadows,

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

She knows that the room will dance in that earnest
Way that rooms dance. The building will kick in too

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

Cynical millenarian, I like
You in this shot, posed without
Insignia or emblems,

Bemusement was the better part of sanity,
And sanity was your glance past the surly
Occasion to the sheer morning or moment

Détente did not augur a new era
For this unmapped sideshow taking place
On a dirt road off another dirt road.

We cannot live there and wouldn’t want to
But cherish it as a moral charm.