This cusp where a hand could be lent.

Winter berries invariably play host to the worst elements.
I get lonely thinking of a few of them, sole and

     shriveled, by the basement door.


It is something to endure the worst elements,
And to be so gifted in death,

     predicting the future.

Buen provecho.

After lunch our family exited by the long,
Whispering table in the window.

Knives down, forks,
No chewing, no replenishment--

But an untoward whirr
Low in the warm air-something like a slow-moving fog,

Purple and dirty.

Leigh explained that, especially in the small towns
Of Mexico,

Where it was polite, people whose eyes met
Said, "Buen provecho."

It means:  Hey, dig in.  But more broadly, and
More spiritually,

It means, It's yours now--and I have seen you, and we share this.
Rescued together from less, but separated, in a kind of fenced in sky.

No later than now, all these things I love--and they're gone.

I had spent a part of the morning thinking of a Gustav Klimt
Picture, the fur-collared model standing black against the

Somber gold of the evening snow.

I couldn't get that snow out of my head--
How ephemeral and fixed it fell,

As if bleating clouds, leaping the fence,
Each being counted on its drowsy way.

The Library of Congress.

This is just about as good a side as any

To come to the Library of Congress.

I always imagined it caked in news-stopping frost,

Tiffany windows,

Belling above studious gray brunettes,

And oil paintings of their bare necks.

I've waited my whole life to come to this point:

The light in her eye glasses, the hushing discipline of

The librarian at a skyline desk--hereabouts, green

And plaid.

You know, when you get cancer, before you die,

You grow plums,

And cherries.

And when you die everyone shares them.

The sun, I suspect,  sort of brays on the steps.  Less 

Isolated,

And the library is arranged by a sense of smell.

North hill.

How do I say this?

I remember this--but it's not like a normal thing
You would remember.

Not in me do I remember, not in my sympathetic state--

No,
I'm seeing everything for the first time.  It feels that way.

The grass on the hill may very well have been
Here forever.

And the prime apples will never stop growing--they are growing everywhere,
Drooping from green crooked arms in the sky.

I no longer see my reflection in other people.

The Bell at St. Anthony's.

The ochre rust that beats us to the arrival of a bell--for no new bell is worth ringing
--frosts the wall, and corrodes the flanging curve.

Sumerians--or some other intelligent society must have seen,

The shape needs to hurry and precede the sound,

And so, swiftly, was it conceived to plunge from the hoist, at a swerve,
Then scatter by the skirting ground.

Who could foster a better or more cracked idea than a bell:

I have a certain kind of abuse I like to touch,
And when I'm lost my ears

Prickle

Near the unoccupied bourse, the broke foretell,

Which might just as easily be the bell of the bell.

A love letter to the moon.

There must be some kind of bedroom specifically filled by the sun--


Or for that matter a kind of non-noctural blooming plum--
A soapy-skin eggplant, and a daylight dead-eyed pea--

There must be a prescription for those beady reading glasses--

What if, keenly being so, as it passes,

The day has--too-- some kind
Of good

And glowing tune?

Falling.

This must be a constant state of darkness.

No one seems any closer today than they were
Yesterday

Arousing the light.

The tilting lids are as they were when the
Trashmen creeped along just before dawn emptying the cans.
I think there is a message in sloppiness--

It says, "I have made a studied effort at
Imperfection so you may never mistake it as it is
For as it was

Before I got here."

Yes, indeed, we are falling ever constantly further away from that gravitational
Custody of the moon.

The little picture of it.

Everyone who goes to the Louvre remarks about the regrettably human
Scale of it, as though it were simply a crowded girl you cared for

But couldn't reach any way you tried.

In bed children often form this basic understanding by looking
At the cheeks on the Moon, satisfied to see
A far off face, no more distressed by what might be

A smile than by what might not.

There must be some kind of dereliction taking places when we admire a picture. Children have
No sense of a classic.  Nothing ever came before,

So everything is happening, only somehow richer.

There, now.  Look at the braids growing around the little picture
Like a maternal python. The glossy curl frames
The expectation protectively.

You know, were an expectation simply a jawline.