There’s a box for her femur and pelvis,
and one more for her ankles and vertebrae.

Monuments: They arrest the eye
like these twin tongues of ruddy stone
adorning Basel’s riverside.

Again this first fall weekend our children dance
(There is little dancing here without our dancers.)
They’ve returned to college, adding to the distance.

My voice then quietly intoned:
Let me be transfigured.
Let me know the opulence of night.

Nothing melodramatic, it’s just when the sunlight
came in through the wired windows and laid itself
down on the green floor, it was nice, we liked it
there, then, playing our games. And like kids

Plugging in the portable heater and pulling it toward my legs I remembered
The braziers under the round table at the finca you brought us to
In the Spanish hills. It was January, a searingly cold afternoon, and in a cave-like room

Is there a secret map of the lives of men
In the slow drift of stars and clouds of stars?
Can I build a house out of hydrogen

The mind, tossing, tosses out new sounds,
or the same sounds thought different, continually,

This vast meandering flat-bottomed gully
much smaller than a valley, with a hump
of rock spined all its length is home to—what,

Musk is a scent derived from a deer gland
that resembles a human scrotum
and thousands of years ago, in Sanskrit,