He gazed into the air, searching for a word in my language.
I blinked. Across the pool a zephyr stirred, in my language.

Where was I? Where was he? Where he looked, remembering?

A cloche in plum,
In lion marigold,
Or mannish toques; a Borsalino. Bring

In a bookshelf at the dark livingroom’s end
stood the ten volumes of Journeys Through Bookland
which my parents bought when I was born.

The night refills itself.
Limestone drops to the sea
that varies blue all day

things are easily forgotten.
yesterday, i was surprised to find 
an ash burning its way 

“Beginning at five o’clock, just before dawn rises
in the rear-view mirror, I drive at eighty, alone,
all day through Texas. I am a pencil extending

I will strike down wooden houses; I will burn aluminum
clapboard skin; I will strike down garages
where crimson Toyotas sleep side by side; I will explode

The avenue rises toward a city of white marble.
I am not meeting anyone. The capitol is empty.
I enter the dome of sleep.

We’ve come to expect earthquakes, fires, hurricanes,
and tidal waves from our whitecoated brothers
whose laboratories shed radiation

Alexander, first over the wall,
collapsed battered by stones. Instantly
the Macedonian companions
gathered their shields over his body