Grandpa loved crawling
Under the skirts of his mother’s friends
As they sat on the porch

Children’s fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse.

        as he drew the silhouettes

against the vast

         machinery, suspending them,

The season of the cut and clear. The bales squared
in the distance, a hollow house, no windows or doors.
The Ns of the fence posts, perforated shadows.

There came a time when she found pleasure
in saying the word pussy, alert to see whom it shocked

Spoiler alert: Jean Stafford, in her
all-but-out-of-print masterwork

Cobbled streets have the burnished look of stone skulls
sinking like a necropolis of Ugolinos from centuries 
of bewildered tourists stumped in the Eternal City, mulling

Virginal decorations.
The pain of countless upside-down candles.

Dementia’s wheeled to the window
for the fireworks, like boneless 

I want to write like a man, probing
my glitchy mind like it’s the rarest orchid.
But I’m cowed,