A squirrel in the rain Is scurrying back and forth. That racket echoes the cadence Of our story, two demons Chasing their tails.

Before it began, somewhere, We knew all of it would come To no avail. The angry tears Or the scabrous wounds Were waiting,

Fangs within their hoods, Claws within their sheaths. Nothing could have been done Any differently, nothing Would have changed.

those obscured writs reported later in our newspapers, as if, the murderer was not in us, or as if we never saw the knives used to repeatedly

slash that steady rain!

This face, my only face which My eyes can see in a mirror In a puddle or in the windshield Of a passing car.

A brown face, now lined around The eyes, topped by a crown Of receding hair, surveying a welter of other lashes.

An angelic face, when it Was held between two hands And pulled towards lips Or breasts to be held still.

And now a lonely face, The bum, the transvestite, the dope Addict’s face, which my eyes avoid Looking at, hands clutching the purse.

While the heart is already broken. This hollow face that can conceal A lot, grimaces, private jokes, passions But as yet failing when it comes to tears.

He goes among razed city blocks, where buildings once glistened like coals in the morning and evening fire and embraces the scattered flowered pushing forth from the cracked concrete, as he lays face down. A flock of blackbirds, which were clotting the wires strung from wodden poles, rise and whirl, in ever widening circles, to the beat of time, to the echo of memory, to the silence with which tears fall, snowflakes fall.

He makes himself small, works with his hands mowing lawns, finds enough to eat, every evening finds himself a place to sleep, usually under an Interstate exit ramp. The only thing he fails to do is to reduce his emotional and intellectual noise to a zero, and fails to become silent. And in this failing, he suffers.

The song rushes forth, its kneel splitting the saragossa flecked waves, of that year's yearning.