Second or third house on the left coming up,
second floor, window twenty-one, I believe.
Window looking for a window, the window
at your back, sitting on the window-sill,
watching the opposite pavement thick from strain.
As you read, try the word on, kingly plunderer,
to be found stolen in a century. You should stop
using these minimum dreams as fuel,
I so enthustiastically underscore lines of yours,
I haven’t been to the pawnshop in two months.
And right you are, never is, never was,
you just listen, listen—you hit the nail
on the head, you were as good as here, and burst
in you will, as if the presence of a faultless angel:
how two-in-one you are to me,
my soul is not that virgin. So he went on promising,
(page torn) and this over and over, she was crying,
she was undressed by a man with your ring on his hand.
At the city limits she watched eighteen trains go by,
her eyes cannot be paired up, sodden doorways of flame.
I am weary of cranial partitions and fabulously busy
like giving birth for the twelfth time and,
as fate would have it, I have so far been unable
to take my place at that window:
you force yourself through solid crowds
on pilgrimages buying in closed shops, your pocket
swelling with what was left over from the selling
of a medal, pocket lined with smashed eggs
and sunflower seeds. Please don’t think I have designs
on the days of the week, like verbs with holes in them.
The past is ripped off like a shutter in a storm,
a car cries out like a cuckoo, or coughs
like an old man opening desk drawers. Once
the sirens sound I hold on to the edge of my Remington
from early in the morning, gun salvos broke
into our house at any time of the evening.
I was that angel of modesty that heated your flat
with my Greek scent, I would scrupulously
scrape my feet and clean my clothes with a brush
moistened in disinfectant. I opened
the storm windows to air I had ceased breathing
long ago, when I made that gesture of denial
against your hands, with the waiter standing
observing my mouth. New waves of the old feeling.
When the train came to a halt near the porcelain factory
they said there was a storm on the lake, they said there
was no storm. In a photograph I study with the eyes
of two families, the city rises outside
the windows of the Hotel Octobre,
my book smiles at me anew, from the window.