for us to drink in Rome

in an apartment that looks down

on the city. It is safe, he says again,

and the light is stupendous,

and the road that inks

the coastline nearly passable

now, and he smiles at how

he has given us benediction,

an unsolicited gift, these Roman

roads, the sunshine, this dust,

the food, the gratitude

of those used to the killing

when, finally, it stops, its

architects greeted when they

sail into port with tea and sweets,

and bread and forgetting.

Of Rockets

Of Rockets

Molecule torn from molecule, a path

for sound. A rumbling

like thunder, with none

of its gentleness, or light.

Our near dark. Fifty

jet engines fired at full thrust,

to go nowhere.

We needed them, to do nothing

but make the air their own.

We were their own.

Reared in the silence

of an aftermath.

Their projection of power

was our home.

Everything,

the ticking quiet of the car

when it came to rest,

the blue ridge of twilight,

the vibration in church

after the organ stopped,

before we closed our books,

it all depended

on the signal that if needed

we could rain fire from the sky.

The base is closed now seven years,

wars now fought by joystick.

The silence is deadly.

We don’t know violence exists

until it’s recorded. Queue

the usual suspects and crowds.

Across the globe, a girl rides home

in East Sacramento

bicycle spokes shining in the twilight.

The Boy under the Car

The Boy under the Car

That night in Damascus

her job was to put

tea and cake,

a sprig of mint,

on a silver tray

and walk down

the crushed-pebble drive

to the boy paid

to sleep under the car.

She never said

his name, or what

he looked like,

or whether, when she came

upon him,

curled up,

eyes black and glossy,

she caught him

singing to himself,

before the clattering metal

made him silent.

The Blinding

The Blinding

If we

could make

an atlas

of pain

most land

would be

terra incognita.

Summer 1995

Summer 1995

Three rooms, sight unseen, rented from a nurse and

her husband, the floors filthy, one working burner

on the stove. Every morning I left her behind

in bed, holding me with a fierceness

I did not recognize as desperation, because

both of us were blind, we had invented this,

the parenthesis of a day between lovemaking,

meals cooked naked, novels read to each other

aloud, the slow walks to a train station, floating,

holding hands as if one of us might zeppelin

away if untethered, and the pain, a knife through

the chest, at departing for just a few days.

I had six jobs, one for a traffic-planning

firm; Tom and I would drive in the dawn hours

to an intersection, lay hose, then count cars

through our hangovers as they rolled to a four-

way stop. Someone, somewhere, would use

this data to widen roads, erect new signs,