What’s missing is the body, its nakedness wrapped
in marble. What’s missing is the hair, the floating hair
that falls in chalky tendrils. Only the face, huge

Narcissus was finally released, though sentenced
by demonic pardon to wander the ends of earth
searching for her. In southern Arizona, he heard

Five is the sum of this world figured by the senses,
and the tally of the planets to the naked eye,
four directions with one person wandering at the pivot.

I have no new myths for fat, yellow colunins
and a discarded Baedeker at the Drake.
The stories I fall upon are old and distant,

The King of Denmark wore a yellow star.
French Jews paid for their own with one textile
ration-point: not what Pétainists wore

Black bars expanding
      over an atomic-yellow ground — feelers retracted —
the monarch lay flat on the street

The ridge road takes the ridgespine every way
It turns. It threads the granite venebrae
And old. wind-dwarfed ponderosas that twist

Loving that man was a way of hating God:
useless, and no sense of privacy.
The fates fell, like cats tumbling

Park Ridgeway’s wife, this hot August afternoon,
comes shrieking across the street with one hand
over her left eye, beats on the front door,

are any houses. That’s for sure. And as for
cars, trucks, tractors, trailers, motorcycles,
you’re in another universe, friend. At most