17 floors
above 8th Avenue
in an apartment in 1962

A layer of snow makes me forget
Spring is just around the corner just don’t
Think of me walking out into the cold

Our last night in Europe 
You stayed in the hotel room 
While I went out for a look 

I can do anything. / It is good to be clear.

There is a bed / that is far away

Here we are at last, meeting face-to-face like two heroes of opposing armies, looking each other in the eye, poised to shake hands. Do you trust me? Do I trust you? No, trust died last century, along with truth, so we’ll have to think of something else to shake on.

Such jazzy arrhythmia, the white storks’
Plosive and gorgeous leave-takings suggest
Oracular utterance where the blurred

Wasn’t the printing press itself a kind of               
omen? Now it is clearer with reprinting:               
   the pocket Aquinas versus Lust

In the middle of making love, he coiled
a handful of my hair around his fist and wrenched
my head up off the bed, cocked it to force
my gaze down to where his body entered.

I am named in my mother’s trust 
but no one knows how to find her land. 

Bounded to the north by the Southern Pacific Railroad, 
east by the heirs of Dugas, Robichaux,
west by a gravel road.

How much of this do I own?