Imagine an overused sickroom,
an army hospital in a war zone:
the reek of sulfur and saltpeter overpowering sweet rotting meat,
a periodic shocking light of casual bombardment
reveals brass colored walls.
And, and, and ...
the noises—too many to catalogue
or differentiate.

A fever feels better,
opening a dream flower—
transfiguration follows death, we know this,
now. We know colors, liquid figures
so familiar somehow.  
Isn't dying a familiar act?

The nurse laving ice water
on my puckered brow should excite me
(bedraggled, blood-smudged,
her hair loose, lips slightly parted
from fatigue or an indisguisible loathing for decay).
Think:  in this given moment
five billion people are doing something else.
Even those also dying are dying in a different way
without ice water.
"Quel dommage," you'd  say, Liesl,

making the bed of a morning. "What're the rich folks doing?"
The sun hot and blinding through the east windows
The room so white, the sheets green, your brown eyes
never averted
aromas of grass, exhaust, drying ***
where is it all?
where does it go?
what brings it here
this polluted room
this anti place
this hole where a stomach used to be
resides a memory of a stomach
recalling hunger
as a good thing to be assuaged with pleasure
Nurse, close your mouth before your soul escapes

From my balcony I can smell the change of seasons
wood smoke and salt and damp leaves,
long-sleeve shirts stale from the bottom drawer
and clouds bunched like sailors to the west
promising whisky and a hornpipe.

who will mourn the hot sun’s scent on plastic
the pallor of long afternoons
bored blind and dull as paint
spattered on old shoes
beside the door

leading to the courtyard
built to watch summers with disinterest
and clay tiles, the perpetual chat
of water in basins with wind in branches
plump with crows.

light the candle from punk
left over from July Fourth,
unstop the bottle of strong water
then scent your neck with the old apples of it
the wise apples and the flat ones

and the pears of autumn red as a nun’s wimple
soft as wet hay
sweet as a kiss in the shade of fruit trees
the sun arching into evening
the insects silent and dead

and your hand
with its long fate and short, tight girdle
its quick Mercury
resting upon mine
as if to say:  here is the work of winter.

The moon is watching through the window.
She sits low over the low hills,
daubing the housetops and lightpoles with silver.
In my drowsy mind
in the cool air of the first moments of tomorrow
I confuse her name and my state,
“Selene” and “serene.”
I think one must derive from the other
though which came first remains unanswered
like the first question you asked me.

Her silver spills into our darkened room
across my legs
bare and exposed on the white blanket
still damp, my flesh still bright and warm,
your head black on my shoulder,
your breath just one element of the silence
as are the neighbor dogs,
the mourning doves,
the passing cars on the hillside.
When dreams turn your face,
gibbous in black hair,
white as milk in her light,
I want to sleep like this forever.

I roll a marble down Market Street
from the hillside
looking over the dusty city
while the sun sets.
It finds a central channel in the cobbled street
and rolls beyond my seeing

past the Kurdish boy on the curb
plucking a tick from his stiff
homespun trousers.
The boy chews a sliver of wild onion grass
he has picked from the feral garden
behind the abandoned mosque

my marble passes now.  Across the street Kastorides
stamps the tin lids on liter cans of olive oil
bearing his name.
From the corner of his eye, he sees the flash of my marble
like a wet pea, wonders when they will pave over Market Street
in macadam.  He shouts for Andrei,  
out of earshot,

marking cards in the alley behind the coffee shop
downstairs from the flat of the student
who glances from the yellowed wall clock
to the Swatch watch on his wrist, then tenderly
lifts the flap of his haversack to peer inside.
He has smoked his last cigarette,
is poking through the butts in the ashtray for a long one
when the phone rings — only once.
The student pulls a sweatshirt
over his bare torso, grabs the haversack

and dashes out.  In the street he sees my marble,
almost slips on it in fact, and stops to watch it
running down its course toward the fountain in the square.
The driver of the truck, distracted by fears of his wife
and blinded in one eye
by a speck of dust which was once a dog’s skin,
takes the corner too hard,
the left front tire giving imperceptibly
over the rolling marble.

Say I was a sea captain in that life.
Say I sailed a barkentine, the Eloise,
on the Azores run out of Lisbão.

I was a sea captain in that life.
I sailed a barkentine, the Eloise,
on the Azores run out of Lisbão.
I found a green disc under my bunk
and instantly knew its use.

You have taken my books.
You're no sea captain.
The color you paint your toenails
is that of weathered brass.
The salt on your neck
and in your navel tastes
vaguely impure, like spray - delicious.

Say I was a sea captain.
Say I had a dinghy named 'Alouette.'

I was a sea captain.
I had a dinghy the crew called 'Woody.'
She sang when the wind stroked her ribs
and the spars rattled. Never mind.

Never mind the night breezes off Mosquito Island,
the roll of the berth as we lay
at anchor in North Sound
plotting our run to Anegada
so you could see Pomato Point
and what the chart called 'numerous coral heads.'
That morning, with Fallen Jerusalem
to port, you said four prayers, one each
to your gods and a last one to Sunday,
which you had neglected for years.

The swell in Drake's Channel is rising.
It will rise all through the night,
and if we are not too drunk on this fine black ***
we will rise with it.