I am custodian of close things.
Even winter trees have blurred
To leaf, and faces come upon me

I’ve seen those paintings and I think he must hate women.
      Must hate
us. I imagine you’d say they aren’t about us, our bodies,

In my dream of Joseph Beuys
      I’m writing a hymn for him, a hymn
of praise, and he stares out at me

Summer afternoon, Henry James said,
the most beautiful words in the language.

It's Papa's coat she's wrapped in,
his old wool Lodenmantel, like a child

wrapped in a blanket of green leaves,

hissing and gaping, and this time it won’t stop —
  nothing will stop its mud-black heart—

The Empire’s train rolls west from Pressburg’s heights;
I fall from sleep to sleep, dreaming of clearwings,
thousands, flying over father’s meadows,

Grouped in the dusk at the station, blameless
and undaunted behind the burn of one shared cigarette,
this circle of children, their wronged can of animate garbage,

The bodies line this lake of suicides.
I visit the locked shed
Where lovers carve their summer oaths. Inside

He is looking at the city from a field,
          the flowers at his back elaborate symbols
                    of some spurned reality: