After Elegies

Almost two years now I’ve been sleeping,
a hand on a table that was in a kitchen.

Five or six times you have come by
the window; as if I’d been on a bus

sleeping through the Northwest, waking up,
seeing old villages pass in your face,

sleeping.
                   A doctor and his wife, a doctor too, are in the kitchen
area, wide awake. We notice things
differently: a child’s handprint in a clay plate, a geranium, aluminum
balconies rail to rail, the car horns of a wedding,

blurs of children in white. LIFE shots
of other children.      Fire to paper; black

faces, judge faces, Asian faces; flat
earth     your face     fern     coal

Door in the Mountain: New & Collected Poems