An anemone
                                     comes a little furtively,
                                         only slightly—it waits to be drawn.

   Grieving takes its lyric turns,
         anciently,
            sometimes en pointe.

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 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.

Of course how could it be different?
We haven't changed:

late summer—

You call out to the one who walks on castle walls,
wakening the storm lashing trees
to spell the stone steps of a night's curse,

Because water and sewer mains are destined
In corruption to flow together
Toward death's vast leavening.

If she faints while in her fast, the chef awaits
her word in a kitchen hidden at the heart
of the hotel. Her hunger, his counterpart,