You are horrified.
Do you wish to understand?

Some men say I've forgotten why I sing,
as if I were a happy, careless thing.

But just my speechless body stayed behind—

In the night, when the newspaper’s
proofreader died
he died without reading the proof.

Nothing is left but the pyramids.
How heavy the stones of the pyramids are!

I cannot tell you when, where
in what city or time
I saw this crime.

You will not discover in my dying body’s kidneys’ yield, who.
All your theory of that and the other is false. Nor is any
woman simple. We encompass men before they’re birthed

I see New Englandly, and the miles gauged in the end are my own
Thousand footsteps measured warily around the sinking neck

The diplomat’s daughter, that straw girl with a shock mouth
and bed-me eyes at eleven, was going back to Norway
end of March. How we ribbed her that her voice was so low;

I still liked anyothertime,
anyotherplace. which means most
of my life, but it was now,

I read about their hive in a beekeeping book,
the 1916 fire near a lumber pile where
they fanned their wings furiously,