her curled hands numb as a tin cup
against her cheeks as icy water
runs down the over-heated skin

I remember when the lights cut out in Prek Eng
the women kept cooking
Three whole tomatoes fried in the dark

Often I have knelt beside her as she lay on the white leather sofa,
repeating to herself, Maybe one day I die soon. All my life, I’ve heard this

it was great to be a little sick with fear but
it’s better to be alive with a driver’s license  

And now the objects return. Chief interests
of their divine secular lives no longer
idle. Thought anticipates them, but they aren’t

Experience teaches, but its lessons 
may be useless. I could have done without
a few whose only by-product is grief,

Reclaimed from brushwood,
from coarse rank grass interspersed
with stagnant bog water,

It rises from the North Atlantic’s stacks
as radio silence, a generalized lack
of discursive tone or narrative movement distinguished

Sad storm of objects becoming things,
the objective correlative, tired of me
as I am of it. I embody everything it hates

This is the house the South built. 
This is the mouse that gnawed at the house 
The South built. This is the cat