“Each ray of sunshine is eight minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December
night. “So when one looks at the sky, one sees

Who could find words, even in free-running prose,
To describe the wounds I saw, in all their horror—
Telling it over as many times as you choose,

In a city where I once lived, for many years
an old man sat on his doorstep, in his hand
a brown facecloth, which he turned
over and over, smoothed out

Foreskin. A default setting.

It begins in the back of the head,
gathering force like the strangler’s
mop in Slam sweeping across the floor.

Atop
The lily stems
A handiwork of Spring
The lily castles

It is the tenderness you feel you know
You may have had the tenderness you miss.
Still in the mask you wear your tongue can go

Even in sleep your shadow watches, me 
Your whisper rustles through the sleeping room 
As though you moved in silks. Why keep on trying? 

You stand in the first dumbness of the snow
        As finely, the gauze drop in pantomime,
        All detail fades upon your startled face

It's exciting—in its lower case way. No, it pleases me enormously, to go out in the morning and see that two or three tomatoes have started turning orange-red, to see the reddened ones a little darker, a softness taking hold day by day.