In the spring, lilacs and mud roads, and later blossoming wind
Then the drone of beetles in high grass as if the grass were droning
He said a tongue doesn’t have bones
He said tit for tat
Like a sack filled then emptied then filled
He was thin, yes, but when he walked past it was not as if a human being had passed
And always he thought: this is it, the end of the world. God is coming

You were first in my thoughts, a chimera, first
Then in the whisper of a sack’s progress over the earth you were speaking:
We doubt we exist. We doubt with certain wisdom the world
Such pains as you took to convert a bedroom into a fire base
Where an angry God, spilled blood itself, lives

X

Having taken these white rooms for a season, I imagine that it might be possible to recover
For an hour each afternoon I vow to sit in meditative expectancy
The light far on the rock promontory reaches Paris
Where an old man’s hand reaches out of the Seine
His wristwatch brilliant enough to catch the eye of a boat captain
There are times when the child seems not yet to have crossed into the world
Despite having entered a body
Memory a wind passing through the blood trees within us
Someone was supposed to have come
He wrote: I tore open your letter and licked the envelope’s seal for any lingering trace of
   you

In the worst of centuries, a merely difficult week, nothing, nothing, then from nothing,
   something
I noticed it today while walking to the pharmacy, where they were already selling
   woolen underwear
The market was closed. There were dead flowers for sale, dead marigolds, hydrangea,
   peony
Smoke rose in a perfect line from the roof
Then it wasn’t possible to go further
Everything seemed intentionally placed where it was, even the garbage bins
The children marched, holding their booklets
Peach leaves slipped earthward. Wind filled with souvenir shops
Doves painted white on the stopped wind
Making up a sort of game

Lamps in fog. Light fingering the canals
And now the defenselessness for which there is no cure
But it is a matter of shared history, or, as it were, we lived the same lie
Why lie? Why not life, as you intended?
I have the memory of a child in the southern slums, lifting the lid of an abandoned toilet
The child on my back, how ever was it kept from singing?
And falling back toward night

It was as if someone not alive were watching
Slowly, that is, over time, itself a barrier
And just then the doves rose and battered the wind
Where a notebook was kept once during a visit
This is my cap. This is my coat. Here’s my shaving gear in its linen sack.

PART IV

Elegy

The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour
the bottle in your coat half vodka half winter light.
To what and to whom does one say yes?
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?