After another night of squalls, the city rinsed of smoke veers From a sail flecked bay.

Like a train accelerating in Its underground dark, the apostate Blood quickens its tread again.

This logic the lurching heart flails To grasp - of how and why it continues To beat out its vegetal rhythm even

As Adrienne recedes deeper into The oaken shadows of a new morning.

A ferry tracks across the sunset bay, Its carmine a reflection of the flame That curls, hissing through the nerves to the blood in abandon. An angel of

Darkness spreads her cloak over Taut strings of bridges, and the glassy Shells of half-lit towers. Reflections of Gloaming in the rain puddled avenues Gleam like freshly hacked wounds.

Memory's hunger feeds on this landscape, in which Adrienne once moved, And through which the heart now, Stops and moves, and moves and stops, An ashen coal cradling fire in its arms.

This sentence like a neolithic arrow Molted with rust, and in a hand He had forgotten, surfaces from A book of poems he had taken Down at random to read on A Sunday afternoon in the summer When the vanishings of memory began.

Outside the dolor of heat, heavy Under a fog of smoke - in the other country heat was dry like her laughter, and trees broadcast their urgent passions Using flags of maroon. How close are Unrelated words - maroon and marooned?

Everything made sense once -in the way his mouth skated across her calvicle, and the way her singing pierced his hands of dripping ice. So on walking into a wood paneled room with an attached garden - meant for the idle contemplation of a scholar mandarin - Years after they had spent a summer afternoon in that museum, his head whiplashes as a girl enters

What story could have been told By those who came from them Had they stayed within the narrative They each told to themselves first? This is the story, he will try to Tell the night, walking home under The radiance of sheet lighting.