His shadow in the frescos
Is the first admitted
Into a picture. Before this,

And so I went forth, exhilarated
in uniform: worn-through jeans, muscle tees,
stripped of bras and ancestral history.

They grin at solemn heads with laurel wreaths
calcified to mottled rock, lopsided, bent—
and wish to fold themselves like thin gold leaf

It was important on this April night
to open the windows, all of them, east
and on the west, pushing the panes

In the Parable of Fire a driver who has been dozing
lowers his car window and pitches his cigarette
into a gulley at midnight. As the spark smolders

It was white I wanted —of snow, clouds, of sky overcast, of
       a star if you take the shine from it. Usual
           sound, light, and I wake—but sense a shift

Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela
   has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials
of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment

A woman of wool lies on a couch covered with pale shawls.
The way it holds her, she and the couch are almost one.
Cold fingers the shawls but she is warm. Though gravely ill.

I keep returning to that window
in the mountains of southern Bavaria.

                                               I’m pushing the halves open

Take Antoine Guillemet instead.
  When he was following that dirty gang
    I thought we lost him. Blinding poppies,