are about connection: his daughter’s name
woven into a plume of smoke.
While my father drank coffee, and smoked,

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

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

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

He is looking at the city from a field,
          the flowers at his back elaborate symbols
                    of some spurned reality:

The workers labor in the emptied lot,
          the sweat of summer’s aluminum noon
                    tempering the dry glint of pick and shovel

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