We can't explain the pained look we
Had in the elevator: it went up, we

Went down, the Prince-Henry-the-Navigator
Mien became a vague line of demarcation,
The new world becoming the old
World so quickly, murder marooned

On the islands, huts of full hate,
Plunder plowed under to grow gold.
If the earth is the terracotta in
Which we inurn the ashes, then

The half-broken moon we saw last
Night is just a brighter shard, taciturning,
Huge in its sky refuge. We had forgotten
About the storm after the calm after

The storm, saturnined, figure-eighted,
Lucky-sevened, deepest sixed. We'll
Wait for spring's high jinks, hail
The joiners, lead the quitters on their

Crutches to Carrionville, home to
The picked apart. What's more weary
Than to be wise? They sturmed, we
Dranged: isn't it always this way,

The big losers taken by the hand of
The perpetually lost? Amend the amen,
Always a feeling of falling, tree
Branches and ankle bones, lashes of some

Archaic whip on some archaic back,
Great gouges in our only asylum, the starved
Nerve, the slow burn of the u-turn towards
What was left that we had forgotten, what

We had gone back up to find, there
In a desk drawer, there on top of a table,
Near the lamp we had remembered so hard
To turn off that it somehow had stayed on,

Even though this near-falling through
The January air, the time not in need
Of mourning, the curve not in need
Any longer of ever becoming straight.