Scraped the last $8.48
from the glass jar.
Your day’s worth of tips

at the nail salon. Enough
for one hit. Enough
to be good

till noon but
these hands already
blurring. The money a weird

menorah’s Arab cousin, flares from manarat,
or lighthouse, in whose heart is harbored nar.

Nel mezzo del cammin what one finds is beans
and wrinkled cabbage and an awful case
of ambling vacuity, an affliction resembling

The dogs are blind and beautiful. A violet
moment hovers overhead, the evening
shadows fill with figured intimations .

Lines and sheets of white are blown, light conjugations,
in layered, flustered carousels and large

the splendid fall of fabled empire-up here, at night,

I’ve looked under the cloud of my heart,
unraveled its complicated net of veins.

We are serious in the same way,
my catalytic converter and I.

It’s hot in this red room,
inside the beating heart of the ritual, explosive

All ashen-tongued and peacock-eyed, Juno,
the goddess of the marriage bed, the gray
of heart, betrayed a thousand splendid ways