This landscape with its somber skies
Must have fallen in love
With a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

bent as I was
intently
over the particular.

He liked drunks in church,
Nudists playing volleyball,
Stray dogs making friends,

On a morning otherwise sunless,
Strolling arm in arm
Past some gallows-shaped trees

Our life stories are scary and droll,
Like masks children wear on Halloween
As they go from door to door

When she still knew how to make shadows speak
By sitting with them a long time,
They talked about her handsome father,

Children’s fingerprints
On a frozen window
Of a small schoolhouse.

There are country roads now that are empty.
They’ll hold on to the light of the day

We were inmates of an orphanage in Kraków;
A prison in Panama;
A school for the blind in Genoa.

O light, unsayable in your splendor.
A lot of good you did to me.