Had I glanced from buttering my toast
a moment before, would my heart
have been riven by the fierce thrust

The genuine pain that keeps everything awake
is a tiny, infinite burn
on the innocent eyes of other systems.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there.

And I, on the roof’s edge,
what a burning angel I look for and am!

But I will go to the first landscape
of shocks, fluids and murmurs

That road
got no people.
That road.

New York, mire.
New York, wire and death.
What angel is hidden in your cheek?

My luckless lady needs no sheet of sun
Nor winter’s briskest word
   To stir her now.

If by this wanton surge
Devised for man and beast
When first a green world told

Alone in the house your father built
and you’ve always lived in, you walk with your cane
toward the door to the basement.