hissing and gaping, and this time it won’t stop —
  nothing will stop its mud-black heart—

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

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