We went by rail (in these little Indian coaches)
to Bombay and to candied fish and dark-tinted Fridays
where the cedars blew about and funerals nested beneath
amidst the delicate delphiniums, the hot lunches, and womanhood in shrouds
as the lords devoured the scorched pigs and grateful homesick Inuit gathered
close to the convenience of the culinary arts and the blooming horse tracks
which feel they receive no support from the Investigatory Board of Spirit
like even the petitioners lost in their unassigned seats do offer
driven away by an awareness of their impartial imperfections,
punctured so some ideal candle shone except when the wind rose
and gathered up in numbered files
to end taking pride in enormous vehicles parked in the enormous evening
down at Our Lady of Early Retirement where the whispering pines
are covered in performing leeches and kerosene lamps
arrayed on neatly clipped lawns provide the atmosphere
partly of overcooked toast and partly of lover’s fatty disrepair
in a shade that is tenuous in poorly drained cul-de-sacs
where the highway’s hand-tooled copperwork rosettes
decorate the discharge of nitrates into our railway tea
or the last freshwater source left on an old straw tray that is offered,
like strawberries handed down into tombs, blushing silence
bleaches the child whose lips were most bloodied by the apparatus
that punched wet terror into mother's magnolia of a bosom, another apparatus
captured in her faint mist housing when the light of her arms clears to reveal -
fresh as sleep’s decadent urban oils – the amorous intellect burrowing
insects in her suppressed weeping, another official delay
of morning delivery, her trackside eggs
and all her money and a chain of honey rags
to haul down and with which to bruise the breakfast birds
and not one relation left to pretend at life
that plays along his gurgling nerves, trailing into leaves
that whiten upon the fevered coffins
like polished memoranda, or a frozen rose at last
in permanent revolution behind each breast, a fan, a tiny cup of sea water
and how my persecutor skirts the humbled crowds
the shroud like sunlight fringed in corpses.