Here is his daughter in a mustard seed bauble
bearing the initials M.S. And this is the hyena’s claw
that dug up ash-cloud & gold putrescent tooth
yet I had to ask, who, how many.

I was all trust and confiding hands. This is a snap of the destroyer
on which a body tried to come clean in hard water.
Here, too, memory’s ineradicable scum
rendered as the famous scream.

There is the miniature house where we four never slept very well –
was it only chance, the refugee street? We moved among them
death in the pocket, the cue ball rolling on felted grass.
These are the countries that stirred fear

around the fragrant globe, whole areas grayed out.
The affinity of heart with ice
a chicken stripped of feathers, candles for new blackouts.
In truth, M.S. sired no children but the wild mustard

boiled down for soap. Still, bees pierce yellow & lungwort
duple lobes which marry seed to breath, Everything
came of that nothing on the street of transliterated names,
gardens where none would bury psalm or song.