He remembered his body.
Thick thighs stood him shoulder high,
fists pounded out the one shape

I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri,
without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin,
stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass

         And nothing we could ever lose
spreads over the white ground.
         Soft ellipses of footprints lead
   into the trees—

Too late. The phone had stopped
ringing, but already the narrow bottle stood
on the table, the water in it reflecting
the rug on the floor as orange. Thinking

You have come to the edge in your T-shirt and tennis shoes,
the trail map snapping in the sudden wind, and there,

like nothing you had imagined, nothing

for Nicole Doise

The way to this is. Not easy to find when you know
how it ends, the clutter of was. Hard enough
finding one's own face in the brass

When the last girl came
to the pile of leaves, she chose
a green one for her mother, brown

When she brought it to him, wrapped in paper
   gray as skin and greased with rain,
his finger lay heavy on the printed word. The news

Can't move can't speak can't think to wonder
why that's so. Song says I still
believe, can't think of what, who

On a Washington Heights corner in the panting swelter,
I learned that grit was not hominy, or teeth, but proud
   squalor.