“I'm looking forward to my death,” she said.
I sat upright. I watched her blond hair sway,
this college girl who taught our Sunday School.

The first poem came at an iron glass-topped table
about the space heater near my feet how my ears fuzzed
from its warmth and maybe something else its coils

Francesco’s fingers must have had their say
About the blessed living near the Word
With waxen doll or with a beating bird

The farms are stinking craters in
Sheer sides under the sodden moors;
When it is not wind it is rain,

Murdered me; why I have no thoughts at all.
Run your hands along my temples where something
Beats like a sea with no land, or a cry

Men that have been bending all their lives
In the one dim lamp of a pension
To lift their needs, relax as in graves

The eye was a masterful horseman
Hardened, proud and fierce.

There the sun was, dying in the abyss,
in a haze of shadow, no sign of resurgence,
cooled, and cooling, slowly, dismally

Lowing of cattle: your voice, to the mind of Virgil,
felt mellifluous, as it does this evening
when a cloud slips off into the dark of the sky,

The thing was exquisite and superbly arranged.
It happened in April, and took place on a day
So mild you'd say love purposely made it that way.