She looked like milk.
She smelled
like vines curled with fruit.

 It’s nothing. A blue wheel blurring, and a wind
catchless, clicking at a window’s high
startless framing—a fixed, transparent eye

All this rain in the place where it rarely rains.
Eyes trained on the sky as if for smoke,
as if for news of the next doddering pope.

The morning flew by.
Not that it matters, it’s nothing
like flying, or finding a dime behind a cushion,

The underworld the bright brochures have shown
declines our courtesy. The rare albino fish
wait in the falls, and the blind salamanders,
ignoring camera flashes, sulk in cracks.

You must be dead at least ten years.
You must have lived an unremarkable life
before that: a teacher, say, of unremarkable

 Ruffle and tuck, river fabric wags doggedly towards ocean,
Heaping surface on surface, its cadence a gown.

Perpetually beneath lurks stillness, a calm inseam sewn

Where were you, nymphs,
when I was learning to apply
the proper plaster of Paris and papier-mâché

Facing wisteria, his eyesight dim,
Monet painted a footbridge over a pond,
dawn, noon, sundown. Seeing only blue,

 I don’t have to tell you. The small birds—
red and black finches, khaki banana quits—
invaded our bungalow, snatched crumbs, devoured