their calculated shrieks so far away

he thought of crickets—while all around him

matted gauze and ether pricked up

an itch so bad he could hardly sketch

each clean curve of tissue opening.

I shut my eyes, walk straight to it.

Nothing special but it’s there, wicker

fraying under my calming fingers.

What if he changed the newspaper into a letter,
then ripped it up and tucked the best part

from view? How much he needed that desecrated

scrap! And the red comb snarled with a few

pale hairs for God in his infinite greed

to snatch upon like a hawk targeting a sparrow—

he couldn’t say At least I let you keep your hair

so he kept to his task, applying paint

like a bandage to the open wound.

Pretty Ida, out to earn a penny

for her tiny brood.

He didn’t mask the full lips

or the way all the niggling fears

of an adolescent century

shone through her hesitant eyes,

but he painted the room out, blackened

every casement, every canvas drying

along the wall, even the ailing coffeepot

whose dim brew she politely refused,

until she was seated

as he had been, dropped

bleak and thick,

onto the last chair in the world.

The Peach Orchard

What the soul needs, it uses.

—JAMES HILLMAN

I say there is no memory of him
staining my palms and my mouth.
I walk about, no longer human—
something shameful, something
that can’t move at all.

Women invented misery,
but we don’t understand it.
We hold it close and tell it
everything, cradle the ache
until it seeps in and he’s

gone, just like the wind
when the air stands still.
I’ll step lightly
along the path between
the blossoming trees,

lightly over petals
drifting speechless and pale.
No other story could have
brought me here: this
stone floor. And branches,

bank upon bank of them brimming
like a righteous mob, like
a ventriloquist humming,

his hand up

my spine . . . O these

trees, shedding all

over themselves.

Only a fool

would think such frenzy

beautiful.

Against Repose

(BALCONY, BERLIN, 1981)

Nothing comes to mind.

I place my arm on my knee

and a small ache shimmers

in the elbow. Gristle

perhaps, or the nub of a nerve.

Who knows? Don’t think;

lean into the wrought iron

until the table quakes, sends the wine aquiver.

Nothing happens.

Red homunculus settling,

green—Libelle? cicada?—drifting by

as a breeze rouses the linden,

lifts a millimeter of leaf

all the way down the boulevard.

This elbow’s no good. I’d rather be

anywhere—and if I dare blink

or belch, or scratch at my furrowed unease;

if I refuse to look up, into God’s

bland countenance . . .

the lost wing would still itch

and the wine stay bitter

in the glass—a mouthful of sin

in an inchful of hell.

Against Self-Pity

It gets you nowhere but deeper into

your own shit—pure misery a luxury

one never learns to enjoy. There’s always some