Memory’s branch quivers
beneath the weight of a butterfly
How am I to know what it wants
without asking

 

So one day the late Bird highly fortified strolls into this posh
boite itself and down there, leaning on the bar, is Wallace
Stevens—newly arrived, old LLD tucked away, sheepskin in
wolf, flirting with the minishirted bartendress—whom he
welcomes. 

On this small island that undoes us daily,gently,
It’s hard to take too seriously, too intently
A town whose name means town

Now LeRoy on the kill room floor
Was almost larger than life.
Mondays the green fatigues he wore

What vague dispassion or crisis of hope
entered the artist's head when, leaving off
his study of a woman, he began,

No single excess, nothing jerrybuilt
or squandered in a fit of thriftlessness
accounts for what we've ended with. Despite

When a man threw his fist into a wall next to my eye
I said that was love, that love was rage. 
I was in the habit of loving anyone who laid a cold hand

When I was five, my grandfather took me to the tomb
                of King Suro, lifted me over the stone fences

                and watched me slide down the mound over 

This is you as a boy.
Your back is to the camera.
You are standing above the beach

To spectate
is a verb
that does not