Under its glass dome, behind its eyes,

Your Panic Bird was not stuffed. It was looking

For you did not know what. I could feel

For the glass – not there and yet there –

A zoo gecko glued against nothing

With all its life throbbing in its throat,

As if it stood on ether. The Princess

Let her hair right down to the ground

From her solitary high window. Remember,

Circling Boston Common together,

The defective jailbird walk we perfected,

Feet swinging from the knees. A Tyrolean

Clockwork, revolving under glass,

To a tinkling. You told me

Everything but the fairy tale. Step for step

I walked in the sleep

You tried to wake from.

                                           You widened your pupils

For thunderclap dawn – at the wharf,

And in came that ice-caked ship,

Fretworked chandelier of lacy crystals,

A whole wedding vessel lifted from under

The ocean salt – flash-frozen. Then you turned,

Your eyelashes clogged, and stretched your eyes

At the charred-out caves of apartment block

That had burned all night, a flame-race upwards

Under the hoses, behind the Senate. You howled

With your sound turned off and your screen dark

For tragedy to go on – to hell with the curtain.

You willed it to get going all over again,

Spit one spark of woe through the frozen suds

That draped the gutted building

Like a solid Niagara.

What glowed into focus was blood suddenly

Weltering dumb and alive

Up through the tattooed blazon of an eagle.

Your homeland’s double totem. Germany’s eagle

Bleeding up through your American eagle

In a cloud of Dettol. It jabbed

Its talons at the glass. It wanted

To be born, pecking at the glass. Tears were no good.

Though you could smash a mahogany heirloom table

With a high stool for an axe,

Tears were rain on a window.

We stood married, in a packed room, drinking sherry,

In some Cambridge College. My eyes

Had locked on a chunky tumbler

Solid with coins (donations to pay for the booze),

Isolated on a polished table.

I was staring at it when it vanished

Like a spinning grenade, with a bang.

The coins collapsed in a slither. But the table

Was suddenly white with a shatter of tiny crystals.

A cake of frozen snow

Could have crashed in from space. Every crumb

Of smithereen that I peered into

Was flawed into crystals infinitely tiny