I was in the third seat of the station
    wagon and facing backward
when my mother veered

God appeared to Dante as a cloud.
Dante had been lying on the ground

On a street in a city a thousand miles inland
a woman I'd never met grabbed me by the shoulders
and shook me and shook me and shouted

Writing becomes distant and portraits of hosts crowd the space. The next page becomes as cornered and concerned as a studied artifact. Thoughts not towards anything but embodying a lot of writing. Too many military wives are being arrested. The tiny bit of wandering summarized by a spartan attitude of space.

Among the things that we don't know
about their civilization is the name by which

they called a clay plate such as this, that is

The logic of sleep tells me I can see without eyes,
insists I abandon measurement and calculation.

The sun is fierce over the slum of Kibera
and the iron roofs wrinkle into eyelids
sleepily tilting over damp mud walls.

In the first place they would sustain themselves
on warm, sugary drink, as they imagine herons
and kingfishers do—confusing bodily elegance.

One would give emeralds
for what was not bought from the pear man
who stood in hot, blank sunlight