- 1. Elegy With A Chimneysweep Falling Inside It
Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark, compose
The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear
...
- 2. Elegy With A Bridle In Its Hand
One was a bay cowhorse from Piedra & the other was a washed out palomino
And both stood at the rail of the corral & both went on aging
In each effortless tail swish, the flies rising, then congregating again
...
- 3. For Zbigniew Herbert, Summer, 1971, Los Angeles
No matter how hard I listen, the wind speaks
One syllable, which has no comfort in it--
Only a rasping of air through the dead elm.
...
- 4. Winter Stars
My father once broke a man's hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man,
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, & he held
...
- 5. Elegy For Whatever Had A Pattern In It
Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels
And the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city,
I'm going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta
...
- 6. The Future Of Hands
All winter
The trees held up their silent hives
As if they mattered.
But on one main street of bars and lights,
...
- 7. In 1969
Some called it the Summer of Love, & although the clustered,
Motionless leaves that overhung the streets looked the same
As ever, the same as they did every summer, in 1967,
Anybody with three dollars could have a vision.
...
- 8. The Widening Spell Of The Leaves
--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
--for my brother
Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
...
