Month of the least death poetry, 
I pity you: a bone of a day 
once every four years tossed your way. 

Workers, soldiers, slaves,
all the trappings of royalty and agriculture.
Watching a documentary on ants

A film of mist clings to the storm windows
as the thunder gets pocketed and carried away
in the rain’s dark overcoat. A good reading night—

First appear the tiniest islands, crumbs
brushed off the mainland, each
outlined in china white, as if by a child.

There in the shrine at Lourdes 
Embellished with old crutches, splints, and canes 
(Freely abandoned by the cured, 

That so priceless patience gone
Into these fragments of fret
Intact where the gay figure

Reading? Morning.
Reading morning and a sky like the olive.
Reading the morning in sandals sifting through soot.

 On the mantle a bowl of sand from the Sahara,
a lover’s gift, and as such the map cowers
beneath the bed. So this is the continent

I see New Englandly, and the miles gauged in the end are my own
Thousand footsteps measured warily around the sinking neck
Of my father’s hill beneath my crisp worn dress that hangs,

“Where is he—you know, the . . . one?”
my ninety-year-old friend asked
and I knew that she meant her son—