Some nights are as black
as belladonna—the black that gathers
at the back of the throat when a boy's
voice falls over your head like a hood:

This time the mycorrhizal infection
at the crooked roots of a hazelnut tree
meets a set of conditions so knotted and invisible

Alders, their roots' snarl in marshy soil.
Furtive roads, all summer dust, past
still ponds—a miniature vista

   Because I make the big bucks fooling around
with words, in France sometimes I like to say
   "Sylvia Plath" instead of "s'il vous plait,"

Each forward movement of the clouds leadens
The cupola covering the great men
A bit more. Then it explodes again

All summer, I watched them
make their ghostly caduceus through water—

fleeting, heraldic—

She sweated, sweated and swore.
She predicted a total eclipse
as if it were replenishing shade.

This is the only reality, wrote Sartre,
this public garden and its gravel paths
dappled with sunlight

Nobody understood her cruelty to herself. In this life, cruelty
begets cruelty, and, before long, one would have to chop off
one's own hand to end the source of self-torture. Yet, we

I read about their hive in a beekeeping book,
the 1916 fire near a lumber pile where
they fanned their wings furiously,