I am singing now of the splinter of wood
you got in your knee as a child and never
got out. Of the splinter that sank out of sight

Its else, to them, lets logic spill through. Upend,
suspend what they no longer want to be real,
return them to credulity and they'll shill

What would the world be without
poetry, he asked, and I listened,

his thin Thracian fingers plucking

Into my heart a sure desire enters
that the slanderer can't ever destroy, nor the fingernail
of the slanderer, so long as against his evil speech I arm

For hours now the Last Supper has been over.
And the beating almost over, and morning's cry
Yet to be heard by the workmen in the courtyard

Because the houses
are low and driveways
stubby, the sidewalks

I used to pretend I stumbled into the place
casually, after a long day shopping or
I'd pretend I was a drunk

I was not ready for your form to be cold
Ever. Even in life

You did not inhabit, necessarily, a form,

Concrete forest, puddled houses; clouds
sweep across the sky—a thunderhead
settles in. Think how anger seethes

How faceless their pathos, the ovals
of these heads, huge, smooth, hermetic
as eggs, and solemn, especially the man’s