And says huskily, “Don’t tell anybody
I said that your carotid is extraordinary.”

Young girl’s song, insistent song
wafting from a hidden room and wandering

When as a child
I came to be schooled by the Muses,
one of them took me by the hand,

to wander
between the winds, and find
no home, to scour

veined blossoms falling, the face, lightly
tattooed, of a god

murky and aflame. I watched,
blinking, the setting sun
catch and burnish the glass and flanks of the cabs

After Africa, Surbiton:
An unheated house, and flag-stoned pavements;
No colobus monkeys, no cheetahs scouring the plains.

It’s said they started in beach sand,
but now it’s Gobi, Sahara, Mojave grit
the fish sift through their gills, absorbing 

September, with a paintbrush, on Monadnock.
October, in the backyard, with a silencer.
November, on a windowpane, with a skate blade.

It’s a lonely world
Hi everybody
It’s Dorothea, Dorothea Lasky