In 2012 the ending failed to appear.
The clocks kept faith. The world refused delay:
history, relieved, went back to its career
of working slowly through us, day by day.
My daughter wakes. The room is thick with care—
the kind that counts, corrects, anticipates.
I feel my past arranged behind her stare,
a set of habits posing as her fate.
She has my look—the practiced doubt, the strain
of weighing kindness always for its cost.
I see my life already in her way,
a path laid narrow, difficult to cross.
She’s my stark mirror, shimmering in time
like silver wrapping paper catching light.

I.
Part of my voice died with you—halted, thin,
abrupt as aspens cut at timberline,
where snow keeps working talus down to stone,
stripping the ridge to bone by frost and brine.
I’ll never see your brooding eyes again,
nor hear that timbre when I bend to drink
and take the brook’s cold mouth in a tin canteen
beneath the blunt insistence of the wind.
You’ve become enjambment—memory’s ridge,
mountain and scar, past lovers set like signs:
blue columbine and monkshood at the edge,
some doubling back where judgment breaks its lines.
The trail repeats, then fails, then disappears;
the line gives way beneath accumulated years.

II.
We ate raw rhubarb high on Bristolhead,
panned pyrite out of Gunnison’s cold run,
took quartz and petrified wood, long dead,
from scabbed-out peaks that blistered in the sun.
I was too young to know your Buddha calm,
to know you pitied him, not favored him;
your cocked eyebrow I took for ease or charm,
not skepticism honed and sharpened grim.
Still, anguish moved behind your steady gaze—
those brown eyes held what ghosts refuse to flee.
We burned inside that house in early days;
I mourned you then, though blind to what must be.
Grief came before the words to fix its name;
the house went down, the heat in us the same.

III.
You bore your scars like maps the body keeps,
learned without words, folded under skin,
until the fire took flesh in ordered sweeps
and left the rest for ritual to begin.
Your ashes wait beside a conqueror’s cairn,
a folded flag, my window’s narrow ledge,
to cross Mt. Holy Cross, be overthrown
into the Great Divide, past brink and edge.
We burned in that house—all of us—and still
you carried fire farther than the rest.
Snow works the talus down against its will;
the ridge accepts what will not be confessed.
No voice survives intact what must be given;
the offering lifts and thins itself to heaven.

I.
In nineteen-ten they woke to thunderlight
at Windy Mountain. Snow sheared from its shelf,
fell like a body from a great height,
took Bailets Hotel, took the track itself,
took cars and men and mailbags in its run
and drove them through the dark into the trees.
The Spokane Express was torn apart, undone.
The sun rose on a valley filled with wrecked degrees
of iron: boilers split, pistons bent,
sandpipes cinched tight around the standing pines.
They counted ninety-six dead from the rent
of snow and steel, laid them along the lines,
and sent them down on sleds. The mountain held
the rest; the river held what bled and cooled.

II.
Two lawyers jumped from Twenty-Five and lived.
They slid the switchbacks under Cascade Tunnel,
came down end over end and rose half-given
to breathe again. Below them lay the funnel
of dark and quiet—Jesseph, Merritt, snow
packed in their cuffs. A whiskey flask went round,
the proof passed hand to hand. Yet just below,
they found Ms. Starret pinned where branches wound
her to the wreck. Her infant lay beneath
her breast, the crying gone. Another son
they cut free living, blood along his teeth,
a stick drawn from his head. The work was done
by lanternlight. The snow came down anew
and covered what the night let through.

III.
You brought me here among the dead,
among the names fixed at the rim—
a nurse, a child, a writer gone to bed.
You knew what weight I’d carry in.
The wire burns between my hands, above
the cliff where alder closes over ruin.
What did you want? I bring you nothing of
the relic kind—no leaf from Bhutan,
no cuspid from Siddhartha’s mouth, nor canine
splinters lifted from the rood of Calvary—
I only cede the ice-tipped thorns of Whitebark pine,
the ash of our own catastrophes
shook from the severed veil
and scattered along the Iron Goat Trail.

A cross-dissolve might be construed
as too sentimental for a seasoned eye
in a non-antiquarian such as you.
Which is to say, you would decide
to show the portrait of the young aesthete
enjambed against an ailing patriarch,
like Kubrick’s up-cranked primate
hurling his bone in a heavenly arc
cutting to an indolent craft in focus,
marking epochs in between
the static grace of Discobolus
anticipating still this box of dreams
and a thousand statues flickering in the dark.
That would be you. You’d drive the reel ahead
past creaking scenes, past dialogue and arc,
past diegesis heavy with the dead,
past hemlock, ailing masters, acolytes conjoined,
and say: Just cut to the fucking point.

Tonight the prompt was placed beside
my leather journal—random, my wife’s choice.
I noted it, then set it down, applied
no pressure to respond, no inward voice.
I am indifferent to cherries still,
and equally to prompts, their formal stress;
they sit, requiring nothing of my will,
their presence more a fact than an address.
Stravinsky said constraints would set us free,
to serve precision, nothing more and nothing less.
But then, he never answered to the plea
of three fixed cherries—though he did confess
a lasting spell from Petrushka’s chorded air.
By morning, three orange vitamins were there.

I.

When Christ had driven the money-changers
out of the temple, he couldn’t foresee
the irony— two thousand years later,
I’m outside of the Vatican City
haggling over a Pope in a snow dome
as my wife digs for Lire in her purse.
There is a perverse energy to Rome,
especially inside St. Peter’s Church
where saints and martyrs vie for attention
in the tapestries, frescoes, and friezes—
even the Pieta near the entrance
eroticizes Mary and Jesus,
with their smooth bodies in blissful repose
like lovers having a post-coital smoke.

II.

Joah points to a handsome youth and swoons:
“I could see him in an underwear ad.”
For the remainder of the afternoon
I imagine the slight Italian man
in boxer briefs, tensing for a camera.
In the evening, we take our gracious hosts
to watch “Wozzeck,” a German opera,
then make our way backstage after the show
by posing as American pop stars.
Zubin Mehta fields reporter’s questions
while the lead actor drinks bottled water
and blots his armpits with a wet napkin.
“Do you speak English?” I ask in German.
“Bloody well should.” he quips. “I’m from England.”

III.

On the train back to Florence, my wife rests
as the cypress trees outside the window
gradually recede into the mist
then fade altogether in the shadows.
I stare into the distance, eyes half-closed,
and remember the previous morning:
the frantic mothers running toward the Pope
when he entered the square in a white Jeep,
comically ascending the marble steps
like Ernest Hemingway on safari,
his arms shaking as he reached out to bless
the frightened children. Then I fall asleep
and dream of a woman in the desert
wandering in the sand with a hair shirt.

IV.

I’m jostled awake in the train station,
and immediately look for a pen
to commit the images to paper.
I dreamt of the Penitent Magdalene,
Donatello’s apocryphal figure
in the museum behind the Duomo
which I had visited the week before.
In every doorway, a guard was posted
reminding the tourists: “Please do not touch.”
Their words now took the shape of a poem—
a reference to Mary being rebuffed
after Jesus Christ crawled out of his tomb
and said to her “Noli Me Tangere”
when she threw herself at his wounded feet.

V.

I was uprooted by Donatello—
my trunk carved into a woman’s body,
bent in an eternal contrapposto,
and christened the Apocryphal Mary,
Thus my creator was finished with me
and placed me in a room with large sculptures
where I stood unmolested many years—
when at last, a great flood broke through the doors,
spilling high above the window ledges.
I floated quickly past the Bargello
and saw the bottoms of the old bridges
as I traveled down the turbid Arno
behind Cimabue’s yellow Jesus
and Ghiberti’s gold Gates of Paradise.

The clock reclaims the room one murmur at a time.
Smoke thins; the glasses dry to chalky rings.
The sheets uncrease. What loosened learns its seam.
Your breath goes even. Nothing touches, clings.
A cat cries once beneath the radiator,
or maybe that was earlier—before
the light was killed, before the second pour,
before your watch came off beside the door.
The minute hand returns what it displaced:
the words you practiced, then the careful pause;
the bedroom clock, still ticking out of phase;
the name I didn’t ask you to withdraw.
At last the hour yields what started this—
a body standing where it wasn’t yet a kiss.

I tell myself the house is only wood,
old nails, a roof that leaks when God feels bored.
But every dusk it tilts—a confessional door
ajar—inviting and accusing. You stood
at the kitchen counter, haloed the way
cheap bulbs sanctify a lover leaving.
I watched the terrazzo patterns weave
our shadows, even as they pulled away.
Forgive me—though I never learned for what.
My tongue still tastes of penny metals, sin’s
small currency. “We’re fine,” I said, the thin
lie cracked like plaster in a too-cold spot.
And just like that, the evening filled the room,
light receding from a familiar wound.

I write this with the sun behind my back,
flat on a chipped green table—rough Formica
cold as a hospital tray. I stalled, the brightest
flecks reflecting light like sins I can’t retract.
“Can you be saved?” you asked. Christ—your knack
for dissecting me—and my maniacal
habit of drafting grief into a mythical
shape—left me split between attack
and retreat. What’s needed, I suppose,
is not revision—just the truth: how women
draw us in with that unguarded pose,
the grace note just before the guillotine. Again
I tried to mend the poem, stitch its prose—
no sentence saves it; nothing here will close.

I.

She pushes her cat like a sacrifice
over the soft edge of the water bed
to mingle on the rug in the sunlight
with paperbacks annotated in red
and crushed cigarette butts in coffee tins.
In the window, elongated figures
are frozen behind her saffron curtains,
like relics in primordial amber
or Greeks adorning a black-figure vase—
a primitive diorama where light
throws canted shadows over the bookcase
past the kitchen wall—while her sleeping mind
quietly imposes an obverse world
behind her eyes, the shades of Grecian girls.

II.

Like the Ergastines in procession
passing half-dazed through a marble city,
she marvels at her unbidden passions
preserved for antiquity, in a frieze
forever fixed within the pediment
above her, mounted on her bedroom wall.
Then her sable cat pounces on the bed—
she wakes, stares at the alabaster vault:
What is divinity if it can come
only in dreams, after reading a book?
She looks over to the glowing curtains,
to the strange figures with extended necks
floating, Giacometti-like, in the sun,
who, voice by voice, seem almost alien.

III.

The tyrant god invented his own birth,
invisible spirits strewn about him,
and he moved among us, composing worlds
and the stubborn leavings of his system—
with neither allegiance to earthly souls
nor fear of a god more omnipotent
to move or mitigate such requital,
to desire something other than himself.
And from his nebulous perch, divided
man in twain, giving him body thetans
to antagonize his vulnerable side
like the vultures pecking at Tityus.
The muttering king, listless in the clouds,
thus filled the world with a peculiar doubt.

IV.

She says: "I’m gladdened when my Bombay cat
returns to me—bounding from the rug."
She floats on her wide bed, her noontide raft,
and navigates the emptiness above,
the splintered beams where every lucid thought
must interpose: "Where, then, is paradise?"
As if watching martyrs chained to a rock,
she places her hands over her eyes
to avert that ancient catastrophe,
the slow encroachment of the years
now shuffling like a chorus at her feet,
long after the sunlight has disappeared—
further into the water bed, she sinks
as it undulates on suspended dreams.