“Do you realize,” I asked, after biting the sensitive
Spot on her shoulder, “that Darius was incited
To attack the Greeks by a homesick physician in his court?”

Riding from the capital to my home in New York, I noticed that autumn was still intense here in the south and I thought to write a poem, a posteriori, that would, by its rhythms transmit the rush and transition of the season, but full of regrets for not having been able on my trip to formulate or remember answers to certain questions that had been put to me about myself and my work, I am attacked by anxiety that the placid beauty of leaves changing color out the window of the train cannot alleviate.

Not his body, bulkier in a tuxedo,
Nor he, awkwardly standing in a pew 
And wondering with his Connecticut mind,

My father raised me to know
that I am not different
from anyone else. This knowledge

It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopped

spring water
in a large low bowl
the carps’ gills

Shall I come to see
plum blossoms in every stream
and wet my sleeves

One thing I think everyone is nostalgic for, though perhaps without being able to articulate it, is a time when literature would begin a little less abruptly, without a lot of facts about cracker-named people before you’re told who they are or why they’re there, like so many dog-wagging tails or a pair of narrating lips set chronicling by one who imagined that a tone of

a mythology begins with a question like who are we, where are we, what is red, why paint, why me, lord, why? a person who knows all the answers can only borrow a mythology like i’m king midas or i’m god. 

Between laps the sun drops
through its arc, lurching
like the clock hand
I secretly watched