On this small island that undoes us daily,gently,
It’s hard to take too seriously, too intently
A town whose name means town

Drones out brittle, weary invocations, the certainty
                                      of fruit now distant as the first word
On God’s tongue. Such disarray. So much leaf-rot,

It was foolish planning to arrive at noon 
But, in retrospect, it doesn’t really matter. 
There was a bar, after all, where we bought water 

Once in the sweet dark of an empty house,
All alone while the others slept upstairs,
I knelt before a memorial candle

The Wish Department

Today I sight-read the last 
Schubert sonata: he wanders between keys: evasive

Another cow was floating by us,
hilariously calm, bell-deep 
in milkweed and tansy. She looked 

She Said in the LADIES,
in the rest area LADIES on the road to 
Terre Haute. Plenty of angels, she said again. 

Not just because a child draws him — pie-faced and frontal, 
Grinning—it’s hard to watch the man’s head and hands take shape 
From a black magic marker, despite the other colors in the box: 

The whole idea of it makes me feel 
like I’m coming down with something, 
something worse than any stomach ache 

The imagination, improvising, translated burly leather 
into an overcoat of armor, converted brawn to iron. 
For wrinkled folds, die-tooled metal plates