a list fell out of the telephone book
father’s whorl whirling writing

Her hands covered her face, her shoulders
Pulled forward, and her back became herself.

6. I cried for a long time but finally slowly stopped, loosening my grip on the nurse’s hand. Because his arm was a prosthesis and he had gone away leaving it with me, it fell to the floor, clattering.

I arrive gasping, my head on your thigh
the head of a drowning man, a shipwrecked man

  He remembered how she’d fling her hair. And the moon …

So if it is true that I must live without you, stranded
here in the land of good behavior, I begrudge my hair nothing,

He belongs to her.
He is either her mother or her only child.

eating our clean bread the way we used to eat your blessings.

as the moon begins to swarm
with a papery ash of moths.

His eyes dart through a physical-asset
inventory; he asks, was I wondering,
as he gestures to the contents of his cart,