the women they are
really interested in
are inside the house

	the house is shaking
	maybe percussion inside 
	or seismic tremors

		outside, they know where
		the calm places are, where they can 
		stand, what they can touch

	if the evening gets
	that Cuban edge, maybe they’ll 
	go in anyway

inside the house are
the women they are really
interested in
                        

When we breathe together, nothing has a name.
Now only steel guitars can say your name.

They showed me a room; it was round, and had no doors.
When I asked for the key, they told me it was your name.

A rich man approached me (through an emissary, of course).
I was in default; he planned to repossess your name.

A poor man sent you a message on an oil-soaked rag:
He had written a thousand versions of your name.

I went to the desert; I laid my head on a tufted knoll.
All the prairie dogs in Arizona know your name.

At evening I was naked. It was cold, but I didn’t care.
The moon slivered through the prism of your name.
                        

Stripped of context,
a poem wanders through
dim light as a socketless
eye mounted on stork legs,

weaving like a sailor.
But it won’t last. Already
tufts of hair
push out, then genitals. Grass is

growing, in tufts 
as well, through cracked sidewalks,
broken bottles,
the bad part of a city.

The streets are narrow,
Light’s angles jagged,
places to hide.
The poem finds a pair of

plaid baggy golf pants.
It’s developed a waist and arms,
tapered fingers,
a mouth that smiles at hard things,

gapes at soft things.
The sidewalk’s gone from shards
to crumpled concrete,
then to rutted dirt,

a grassy way
through fields of dried cornstalks
picked bare by wild 
turkeys and migrating geese

to a small town where
the sidewalks are slabs of bluestone.
The poem settles.
It finds work in a store: knickknacks,

antiques, curios. 
It marries a girl with pale eyes.
She has a past,
but they never discuss it.