At that critical moment, she whispered later, the panic
   of absolute doubt breathed on her left breast
While he was touching her right: what if this light reflected

Heraclitean, for instance: the world as a gaseous
Shimmer, like afterburner fumes in the oily night sky
Outside Carbondale, where lovers pass through the flux

Perhaps there was a rug
There once, a hooked one
Originally owned by someone

With Pelléas and Mélisande, Claude
Debussy turned to sleeping figures:
the garden was growing cold, its trees

He's never seen these stars before
and tumbles headfirst down
the castle's rumpled courtyard stairs.

The dandelion was hidden
That day in June
When the moon eclipsed the prairie

The list of small deformities passed unrecorded
In the stupor of heredity,
Like our weather,

Lost causes confound. Where are you, cousin, 
since you swung upside down the iron gate
outside school? The earth is your sky—correct 

hammock me in the graveyard alone under the flowering noni tree grandmother me blown-turned leaves

Tremor in his hands. He turns obsolete
leaves edged with thunder since the opening scene.
What he sees he reads under croton shade,
out in the sun.