Two people dying I assumed with no more preparedness
than I, recently and by accident said how they’d like to go.
For each a party and for one, people wearing balloons

Four draped muses emerged to the coordinates
from a swirling curtain of acanthus leaves.

There is no longer just the knife, a bundle
                of sticks, and a pot with fire.

Now, in another part of the country,
I hear it called “staying over.”

The swirling, soapy lather
burns in the mortal drain

His coughing woke him, wrecked him (or his father’s

hammer did) and broke the spell like molten iron

I stand before this landscape at dusk
   jacklighted, caught in the high beams,
shocked into stillness, rapt, incapable

The grinder says a freak is either born
or made. But he is paid to lie. The congress
I have known is complicated: that pickled

2. The Room in Which an Orange Is the Only Light

Why such irony in re the mystical context when a graph of even the most commonplace exchange would appear perplexed; when we drop out from the plainest statement in the posture of a bat?