Even in Rembrandt’s portraits,
they don’t look like a ruling class,
and their wives are no less pronounced, prizing money not blood, merit

I know that feeling you have: wanting the world,
at last, to yield something, the way liquor does—
an angle, an idea, a color, a deepening.

Niccolo is restless in his bed. He wants
to run, wants to cut out over the humped
Italian countryside while the fields are still

In solitude, what happiness? asks Adam,
   with all of Paradise before him, for him.
The birds of the air, the beasts of the field,

And Cathay was not China.
And Vietnam was not China
Nor made in China—but close enough.

When as a child
I came to be schooled by the Muses,
one of them took me by the hand,

Young girl’s song, insistent song
wafting from a hidden room and wandering

In my day, we knew how to drown plausibly, 
to renounce the body’s seven claims to buoyancy. In my day, 
our fragrances had agency, our exhausted clocks complained 

          The light that changes
the light that goes out

What if I made you hear this as music
But not how you mean that. The slow beam