How soon spread the stains Over the sidewalks of snow! Boot marks like tracks of some Crazed insect, and yellow dog piss, The only color visible on this Dusk cowled tenement street.

Radhika sleeps: another whiteout Which hides the sudden doubt Creeping into her sleeping arms, Wound around the sifting dark one: Will the morning bring radiance or Just that familiar old ache for it?

Any clear thing that blinds us with surprise - Robert Lowell

In a bole of burnished coppe,r I lean my face against the parchment Of beech, and think distant thoughts Of America, or rather the maps That stand for America - one of which I opened at the tail end of a winter, Shivering mute - a tracery of veins On the prairie of a waist, and cities Dotting distances, like moles along The gulf of a sleeping throat.

Now I find myself completely lost (or more Precisely at a loss) in this mapped America. Memories, and the labels that I applied to them have gone awry like a scrim of puddling rain drops Tell me, do the beeches remember, later, these leaves they shed like A trail of hot tears? Tell me, do you remember how I mapped you, blinded & blind, in that far away night, Adrienne?