Midsummer with other men’s lovers, fumbles
on a living room couch, significance asleep
upstairs: I come through the door, I come

I was walking with the backward
river, sluggish water dialects
spell out spilled lakefront’s

The hulks lie on their sides amid the breakers,
the wrecks of mischance rot. I could lose myself
in riddled waves: sailors drown daily there.

In the painting by Guido Reni of Saint Sebastian
in the Palazzo Rosso, which reproduction makes available
to those who travel only on the page, the saint to be

They are my parents.
Both are walking toward me,
she on the left with a mud caked
wooden box in her hand propped

“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