What have I been disemboweled for?
Where are the gods I was told I was made of?

“But you are starting at the wrong end, ”I say.
“One is usually destroyed from the head down.”

He wanted no money,
had nothing to sell,
didn’t boast or brag or bitch

There was an odd community giddiness
in that orange-stand shaped like a pagoda,
but also a fabulous wittiness.

I am what I deserve, blinkered, public,
Get-atable, indecorate, with finch-like tints,
Neither black nor white but always gray,

What man, tell me, ever
crossed the street like that,
an angle boxed on a sign,

The doctor had said he could fix everything
Except the eyes.

Spring again. Wet April calls the blue
from the sky, would give me names
for all the green things writhing from the earth’s

When the last girl came
to the pile of leaves, she chose
a green one for her mother, brown

We missed the point: the red gash
of a hood was a door in the forest,
a mouth to the unknowable. We wanted