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For a long time the Spanish from Spain
Who came here became slightly insane
In a special way and just a little.
You can try this yourself.
Walk farther than you can into the forest in New York
So it’ s a toss-up whether or not you know the way back.
For you there’ s going to be a smidge of confusion, a glow of fear

I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.

I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.

The wind that makes your hair grow faster
opens a child’ s mouth full of strawberry and sand.
Slow and sure
on the scales of the ocean
the child’ s head outweighs the sun.

Because with alarming accuracy
she’ d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of — this tic, that
tendency, like the way I’ ve mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt —

I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.

Where you've fallen, you will stay.
In the whole universe this one
and only place is the sole place
which you have made your very own.

The country runs away from you.
House, mill, poplar — every thing
is struggling with you here, as if
in nothingness mutating.

But now it's you who won't give up.
Did we fleece you? You've grown rich.
Did we blind you? You watch us still.
You bear witness without speech.

To say how much I've missed you, I offer this,
at most mist, at least assorted letters, lists,
numbers I insist tell stories. I kissed you
last, Dad, in the casket in which you passed on,
to some next place, but last listened for your voice
last night, these long years after, will listen next
when next oppressed by blue-gray, as I am now,
as I, thus lost, am always by your absence.

Night is a cistern. Owls sing. Refugees tread meadow roads
with the loud rustling of endless grief.
Who are you, walking in this worried crowd.
And who will you become, who will you be
when day returns, and ordinary greetings circle round.

The world has certified itself rid of
all but the argument: to eradicate or not
the small stock of variola frozen,
quarantined — a dormancy it has
refused, just once, for a woman behind a sterile
lens, her glass slide a clearest, most
becoming pane. How could it resist slipping
away with her, that discrete first pock?

She visits still too much, dressed in aromas
of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost
knowing she’ s close, me not getting younger
or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate
I’ m broad awake: her witchy presence waits
for me to jump into her arms, but then she’ s just
an incoherent ache in sleep’ s freaked scenes.
I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists
vaporing nooses around my head and feet
and genitals, conjuring my drab hair
into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.