Market flowers in a jar, a string of tied garlic, and a voice moving off as if fearing itself
Under the leprous trees a white siren of light searches
Under the leprous trees a white siren of sun

II

A row of cabanas with white towels near restorative waters where once it was possible
   to be cured
A town of vacant summer houses
Mists burning the slightest lapse of sea
The child has gone to the window filled with desire, a glass light passing through its hand
There are tide tables by which the sea had been predictable, as were the heavens
As sickness chose from among us we grew fewer
There were jetty lights where there was no jetty
What the rain forests had been became our difficult breath

At the moment when the snow geese lifted, thousands at once after days of crying in
   the wetlands
At once they lifted in a single ascent, acres of wind in their wingbones
Wetlands of morning light in their lift moving as one over the continent
As a white front, one in their radiance, in their crying, a cloud of one desire

The child plays with its dead telephone. The father blows a kiss. The child laughs
The fire of his few years is carried toward the child on a cake
The child can’t help itself. Would each day be like this?

And the geese, rising and falling in the rain on a surf of black hands
Sheets of rain and geese invisible or gone

Someone was supposed to have come
Waves turning black with the beach weed called dead men’s hands
The sea strikes a bottle against a rock

III

The photographs were found at first by mistake in the drawer. After that I went to
   them often
She was standing on her toes in a silk yukata, her arms raised
Wearing a girl’s white socks and near her feet a vase of calla lilies
Otherwise she wore nothing
And in this one, her long hair is gathered into a white towel
Or tied back not to interfere
She had been wounded by so many men, abused by them
From behind in a silk yukata, then like this
One morning they were gone and I searched his belongings for them like a madwoman
In every direction, melted railyards, felled telegraph poles
For two months to find some trace of her
Footsteps on the floor above. More birds
It might have been less painful had it not been for the photographs
And beyond the paper walls, the red maple
Shirt in the wind of what the past meant
The fresh claw of a swastika on Rue Boulard
A man walking until he can no longer be seen
Don’t say I was there. Always say I was never there.

IV