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from
Travel 
III. Households
There was always another and
another and another,
–H.D.,
Helen in Egypt, (Leuké, Book Five, 1)
Already I have left the details of certain lives,
luminous objects that faded with touch
in rooms where I had surfaced to explore.
Arranged by habit, most carved figures
marked apexes, points reached but not surpassed,
and affixed gaping, cliff-like, boundaries.
Though details protruded into the sense of their spaces
as objects in any room, becoming known
figures…to be dusted, replaced.
Now that I know all turns—
known
figures—in the recesses of space
a reaching brushes many such objects
knowing not what they are. In rooms of night
it was best to untangle from the role
in a house; breaking apart the wolf’s face-mould
that had been cast, and set onto my features, I shook claws
from my hands like dust, and left the doe-skin pages
of rules. From lives, loves...
somewhere, in
darkness,
in an apartment beside the family
I had worked for, or the room, where I had gone
to study, I might sense the crowded tympanum
now like an orchestra ready to take its seats:
horribly weightless, and spinning in time,
the offers of certain men, and of language.
XI. The River
—I was not sure what it was I should remember:
afternoons along the river, no half-naked children
swinging out over the current…but an occasional
fisherman’s son wading out in waist-high boots…
and yet returning to the edge of my bedroom
my heart strained audibly, and I tasted rank dust.
I have failed something, am failing now.
And it is not odd to resurrect it
in the quiet; what rises from the water
and follows me home is a dead man, composed of debris
and oak-brush. His steps are in my blood:
his steps and the splash of adolescent bodies,
startling again, though nothing is here.
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