"House with an Attic."
Nothing happens again.
Although I have spent too many candles
and faintly lit rooms teaching you,
while the ocean is teaching the gravity of its charges
and urchins, who even we have greeted in their youngness.
I find not so much a thief as a keeper of the past in you,
where the end holds no light, when the light dies
and fog smudges over the night windows,
the windows at night like a thumb.
And though you are ill and I am too,
I will happen to offer you a dark gentian
as they are dark, as the idiot teaching of a few poor ledgers
is dark, and there are holes there as well.
Speak kindly when wind escapes the water,
so those inland may draw water from the river well.
And if there is emptiness, allow each the forehead and the hand
in winter, so we may eat and look up not so darkly.
They are the summer places of collapse, the others
we watch with their--
they have given us every candle to see the ledger under light.
So many names are missing--
Monday, fact, Tuesday, fact.
And just beyond the water is the house
with an attic which greets us with its idiocy.