Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants,
the theatres, the grocery stores; I ride the cars
and hear of Mrs. Bedford’ s teeth and Albuquerque,
strikes unsettled, someone’ s simply marvelous date,
news of the German Jews, the baseball scores,
storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turn
the pages of a thousand books to read
the names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendhal, André Gide,

A rose can’ t change the world. It can only open or close.

A rose drives the world like an enormous gear.

It pushes a schooner east of Borneo.

When a body has been rearranged, it is held together with a rose.

A rose is a weapon, a guide, a compass.

It shatters the glass to explain a spilled blue shore. This is how we know we are in the presence of tragedy.

You shouldn’ t have. You couldn’ t have. You did. You are.

We piece together an aftermath.

My father was an enormous man
Who believed kindness and lack of size
Were nothing more than sissified
Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded,

His eyes were the worst kind
Of jury — deliberate, distant, hard.
No one could outshout him
Or make bigger fists. The few

Who tried got taken for bad,
Beat down, their bodies slammed.
I wanted to be just like him:
Big man, man of the house, king.

We’ d often
been included in

the weather, whose
changes (as in the

still, portending
darknesses of after

noon) were hardly
evident, if even

manifest at all.
The August rain

over Mixcoac
& the deadening

of all aspect
at a distance:

yet our sudden
wet bodies, firm

swelling divested
finally of shirts

& trousers, left
beside turbid

footprints on
the tiled floor;

this tongue, these
lips the lightning