315.
I can’t help it if it tells the truth
the weather’s like that, breeze and
knees
there is waiting to be done because
the world
subways are so old-fashioned
we are children when we go down there
blue light in the Clark Street tunnel
the hardest is to be now at all
broken branches where the deer
browsed
I think of winter and of Scamander
the river rising to rebuke us
the gods of everything for
everything’s a god
not us though we’re on the other side
of that.
316.
In the completion things get in the
way
until it occurs to her they are the way
then she leads me to it and you too
the other side of everything and here
we are
I have to talk like this I am a voice
only what we say counts not what we
do
he said and climbed the rain-drenched
slope
into a Chinese dream he never wanted
did he
why all those fan-fold books peonies
and lexicons
of course he wanted to go there
provided it was here
only the voice moved drifting over
the hospital gardens
old man weeping on the marble steps.
